Michael P. O'Connor

Face it – we’ll always have porn. Unless the entire planet is forced to take desire-supressing drugs, we’ll always have these desires. While I agree with your logic – that porn sites should be limited, sort of a red-light district, unfortunately that won’t happen. Here is why. Ignoring the multi-million dollar contributions to politicians, the porn industry is mimicking the television industry – by going into “reality” television. I was interested in the whole “.xxx” discussion, since I knew exactly what the next step was – moving all porn to .xxx and setting up a filter – like you mentioned. The statistics some very horny researcher pulled is that most porn site traffic is from amateur or temporary sites. There are very few sites like sex.com or whitehouse.com, etc. Most are advertised for a week, just to get people in and make them click on banners, and move on. When comparing it to the real world, it’s like saying if we create a red-light district, there won’t be any illegal activity outside of it. It just won’t happen. My real problem with “.xxx” (or any other domain name like “.ws”, etc) is that Icann is the monopoly creating these at random. When they created .ws (.website – brilliant idea from their redundant department of redundancy), they just made themselves millions of dollars from corporations like Dell and Google to scramble and register their own domain names. There is no regulation and it can do whatever it wants. Worse yet, it’s best competitor is Network Solutions, another giant corporation. Although I wouldn’t want the UN managing it, like some suggest, I feel that it should be a US/UN venture, considering most hardware is in the US and we created the thing. Or perhaps cut UN out completely and just have something like NATO for technology. Call it GTEC – Global Technology Exporting Countries (no relation to OPEC) hehe. I’ve also been hearing things about Internet 2 – currently online and being shared between universities. They know what’s wrong with the current internet – too much spam due to massive spoofing of addresses, incessant porn/adware/spyware and vulnerabilities running around, along with too much information such as, no offense, blogs. Heck, I can’t search for anything anymore without hitting a few dozen blogs on the subject. I think all those search engines should remove blogs from searches, since it’s irrelevant information (versus factual information like the library of congress). Hey, set up .blog and FORCE people to move there. So, why can’t they fix all these problems and launch Internet 2, dumping all this garbage and moving on. The other small problem I have is something you said that I keep hearing “I don’t want to see, it even by acident, so give me a way of not having to see it”. There is a way – turn off your computer and get offline! 🙂 There’s this big thing now a days that everyone must be protected and sheltered from everything. Oh no, not children looking at porn. Oh god, was that a breast? I have more trouble with the news showing, describing, and publishing graphic accounts of murder, rape, torture, and other crimes rather than having people be exposed to porn. This anti-porn drive (although it should be somewhat moderated) is really getting on my nerves. It’s like we’re degenerating into puritans. I feel that we should stop the violence first and then we’ll talk. I don’t see many grassroot campaigns to stop Fox, CNN, and all major newspaper publishers from showing, talking about, and printing graphical accounts of things children really shouldn’t be exposed to: gruesome death and violation of basic principles of other people. Sex is a beautiful thing and we shouldn’t be afraid of it – stop the damn violence instead!

Yes, like I said, it should be moderated. The devil is in the details 🙁

The other problem is people using this as a precedent to crack down on other issues, which will eventually find its way to freedom of speech.

oh my god, we agree. Yes, sad how peoples behavior supports things like freaky porn, extremist views, heck, even regular spam! But before we go condemming everything, I agree that it should be clearly separated. We should all have a meeting and say “you know, the first iteration had some problems… here’s the new plan”, which is why I think Internet 2 can really fix a lot of these issues. Put porn, extremist views, anything, into its category. Look at your blog entries, you keyword them, perhaps similar technology for the rest of the content. No more than 5 keywords or so and any extreme sites such as porn, extreme views (nazi, kkk, racists, ultra liberal/conservatives, religious zealots) would be classified separate from regular content such as news reports, history, entertainment (by that I mean CDs, DVDs, Movies, Theater, not hardcore porn shows). Eh, it won’t happen, why bother thinking about it. As far as the UN, I agree, it shouldn’t exist. I think WTO has enough power, since everything revolves around money anyway, why not give it more power and disband things like CAFNA, NAFTA, NATO, UN, etc. Have a global trade infrastructure with individual trade rules. It won’t happen either though, since the US is trying to get more poor central/south american countries on board to try to compete with China – won’t happen though, China is too poor to be underbid and considering how poor an average american is, as sad as it is, the american companies will go bankrupt so the american consumer will save money on socks. I guess we’ll be the leader in ideas, but that seems to be fading away. Instead of upgrading our school systems (and I’m not talking about throwing more money/technology at it), we’re debating evolution vs creationism instead of teaching chemistry, biology, math, etc, anything to create a competing edge. When countries like China with their massive cheap labor force begin to create novel ideas, why would they need anyone? They would do nothing but export all their products and services around the globe. Stay tuned for a China/Indian alliance of cheap labor and high technology. Whoa, how did we get from .xxx domains to global trade practices??? I must have ADD.