The Internet .xxx domain … didn’t we try this once?
I have been puzzled in the last few weeks, in watching the commentary floating around about the proposed “.xxx” domain name extension that ICANN was considering - intended to delienate sources of adult content and pornography on the Internet from other sites. Similar proposals have been made in the US to require that port 80 be porn free.
Am I missing something obvious here, or have I just been around for too long? Wasn’t this tried about a decade ago with the Internet Content Ratings Association’s PICS system? I remember writing about this long, long ago when doing an article on Internet Explorer at the time - and how you could define content ratings to block right in the browser configuration. Gambling, pornography, alcohol - you name a vice, and it seemed as though ICRA had a way to voluntarily indicate that your site or pages had content with that material in it. You can see an example page here.
I can see references to PICS going all the way back to 1997. So if we had a system for websites to voluntarily label themselves a decade ago, and browsers could act on those ratings — why do we need to be considering all of these new systems? Because PICS never caught on … and the main reason, to me, seems rather obvious — traffic is king. It was true back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s … and it’s definitely true now in the days of AdSense enabled websites popping up everywhere. As long as traffic drives more revenue for site operators, it’s highly unlikely that most operators will obey these systems. Even Playboy still employs the ICRA PICS system - you can see their configuration here - but for some reason, we need to move them off of port 80, or off of the .com they’ve invested heavily in?
No … frankly, this model is never going to work … so I don’t know why ICANN and lawmakers keep trying to come up with new magic-bullet solutions to a problem you can’t fix.
Oh well, I guess it makes them look busy, right?