The Null Device

.sex considered harmful

A new RFC has been published, arguing why the idea of a ".sex domain" or of rewriting TCP/IP to include "adult-content" flags in packets would not work and probably do more harm than good:
The American Civil Liberties Union -- and other members of the international Global Internet Liberty Campaign -- caution that publishers speaking frankly about birth control, AIDS prevention, gay and lesbian sex, the social problem of prison rape, etc., could be coerced into moving to an adult domain. Once there, they would be stigmatized and easily blocked by schools, libraries, companies, and other groups using filtering software. Publishers of such information, who do not view themselves as pornographers and retain their existing addresses, could be targeted for prosecution.

There are 3 comments on ".sex considered harmful":

Posted by: mark http://donotuselifts.net/ Fri Feb 6 13:19:46 2004

Completely voluntary .sex (or even .porn) for strictly pornography sites; all other sites should be able to go about their business on .net or .org or whatever.

Posted by: mark http://donotuselifts.net/ Fri Feb 6 13:23:07 2004

Er, forgot to finish that comment. Then forgot what I was going to finish it with. Probably something like "that should work okay" or something. Erm, yeah.

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Fri Feb 6 13:48:38 2004

So should socialism or libertarianism. In theory, anyway. When you factor in social dynamics, the "voluntary" part turns out to be a pie-in-the-sky fantasy.