Morals vs Censorship - XXX on ice
The recent freeze of the XXX TLD launch has sparked some lively debate in certain circles.
Adult content, pornography, x-rated, mature content - call it what you like - always sparks a certain level of debate.
The problem is ultimately one of morals versus censorship.
In an Irish context this is particularly pertinent. We may not have the protection of a first amendment, but we would like to think that we have certain levels of freedom of expression etc., Of course this may be a myth, as can be easily seen in more than one arena, such as our general lack of ease in dealing with such matters in an online context.
Whether there is an XXX tld or not is probably irrelevant to a lot of the debate. What seems to cause confusion is the grey area separating personal opinion and morals with general censorship.
One of the fundamental principles of democracy is a certain level of freedom. Democracy per se does not give you complete freedom, as that would be in breach of the "social contract", however it is also a reasonable expectation that other people's beliefs would not be trampled on by a person's opinion, or in this case, moral beliefs.
In essence, if a consenting adult wants to view adult content that is not illegal surely they have the right to do so?
Naturally there is also a counter-argument.
The one that seems to be vaunted most often is that of protection of minors.
By bringing children into the equation you are bound to provoke an emotive response, however you should also be realistic. Using children as a reason for the suspension of a TLD will not make pornography go away.
Somewhere in the middle lies the truth....
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I would have thought the introduction of a .xxx domain would have protected children if anything. It would allow content filters to be certain that any xxx tld should be blocked.
If anything this whole debate is a very bad one for the US government to have started, it has reminded everyone that they consider themselves "in charge" of the internet. Perhaps we need to use this whole incident as a catalyst for the forced removal of the USAs unlawful power over the net.
The Americans are not going to give up control of .mil and even if they did, who would take over?
My vote is for Blacknight solutions, Michele to run the internet :)
Yes, it's a good point. They did talk about the UN running it didn't they?
There were mutterings about a number of international bodies. The problem is that none of the bodies involved has a particularly good track record with regard to bureaucracry ...
I don't understand why anyone would think that the delay on .XXX would in anyway effect the amount of pornography on the internet. The .xxx TLD is aimed at making current pornographers move from .com All this delay serves to do is make the work of netnanny, cybernanny, etc just that much harder.
Surely an Independant international body should be setup to administer Internet policies. The US are such a hippocritical bunch, producing/hosting most of the porn on the internet, yet the politicians prefer to ignore this fact.