Pornography on the Internet

What about pornography on the Internet?

If you’re reading this essay because you want to find more pornography on the Internet,
sorry, you came to the wrong page. In this essay, I’m not making any judgments about the morality or immorality of pornography, the legality or illegality of pornography, or whether pornography should be legal or illegal. Rather, I have assumed the existing state of affairs exists — child pornography is illegal, consent of adults who are photographed must be obtained, and other than that, pretty much anything goes.

An .xxx first level domain name should be created. Starting one year from now, any pornography as or more sexually explicit than, say,
Playboy
magazine would have to be moved to the .xxx domain name. By having a separate first level domain name for pornography, containing pornography would be much easier.

If you never wished to viewed such images, you could install a Web browser that was programmed never to go to the .xxx domain. The same would be true if you had children and wished to deny them access to such sites — simply make certain that on your computer and theirs, the Web browser installed could not go to that domain name.

(If your child was technically sophisticated, he would probably realize that he could go to www.Microsoft.Com and download the latest version of Internet Explorer, which could access that domain name. Perhaps Microsoft could in the future write its operating system so that if a certain switch was set, one could not install a browser that could access .xxx. You could disable this switch only if you had a certain password.)

This would make it much easier to handle spam for pornography. Almost all of such spam tries to coax you to visit their pornographic Web site. If you checked a certain switch in your e-mail software package, it would read each incoming e-mail, and if such e-mail had an URL with a link to .xxx, it would automatically delete such e-mail, or move it to a certain folder. (If you didn’t want this, you could always turn this feature off.)

After one year, what would I do about the pornography that was on .com and had not been moved? Rather than impose civil or criminal penalties, you simply turn it off ? i.e., that domain name is delisted from the .com directory, and thus anyone typing in that URL would get an error message. An extremely simply and 100 percent effective solution that doesn’t require expenditures by prosecutors or the courts.

Read James’ essay on how to intelligently regulate Microsoft.

List of other essays written by James Mitchell  |  Copyright notice

Cite as “Pornography on the Internet ??? by James Mitchell. January 12, 2001, version 1.1.
www.jmitchell.me/essays/pornography-on-internet.