XXX Porn Domain Coming Soon - Waiting List Pops Up Online

Ten years of persistence by the XXX porn industry has finally paid off. They're going to get an even bigger piece of the Internet pie.

In June, the .xxx domain finally received approval by ICANN, the international body governing domain names (International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).

Today, a ".XXX Domain Waiting List" appeared as a big side advertisement upon entering the words ".xxx domain" on Google Trends. A neat little one-year registration for a .xxx domain site is available at a site called European Domain Centre for just 150 Euros (one euro equals about $1.40 American dollars).

That's a small price to pay when you're in a sex industry that already makes over $13 billion per year - more than all American sports combined. Yahoo News reported that the company which applied for the site, ICM Registry, is excited. Of course they are. An estimated 500,000 new internet porn sites will pop up thanks to the .xxx porn domain, slated to begin in 2011.

According to an article in the National Review Online, porn purveyors insist they're not trying to sell themselves to underage kids. Yet, the only provision to keep kids off pornography sites is the mighty disclaimer, "You must be 18 to enter this site." So, a kid presses a button that says, "Yes, I am over 18." Who's going to know they're only 12 years old?

The pornographers make another claim-that this assigned .xxx site might help clean up the rest of the Internet from pornography.

Will a separate .xxx porn domain get pornography off of other Internet domains? Highly unlikely. There is no provision in the ICANN regulation or anywhere else that says the porn industry must vacate their websites on .com, .net or any other major domain. In fact, this will probably double their "exposure," shall we say.

Thanks to the belief in "freedom of speech" for Internet smut purveyors, many surveys have proved it has cost us an increase in human trafficking for the purpose of using unwilling victims in porn films, an increase in graphic sex and violence against women in mainstream TV and Hollywood movies (see my past Associated Content articles on these two issues here and here), an increase in Internet child pornography and an increase in the destruction of marriages and families due to porn viewers beginning to act out their extramarital sex fantasies.

Don't these things only increase because people want them?

But why do people want them? Much of the desire is due to the addictive nature of online porn. People go from the virtual sexual experience online to the desire for physically experiencing it in their own lives.

The American Psychological Association's Dec. 2009 article, "Porn use and child abuse," stated that most men charged with Internet child pornography offenses are also hands-on child sex offenders.

Here in Tampa Bay, we have a hot spot of adult activity - books, porn movies and paraphernalia stores, strip clubs and a huge influx of human sex traffickers. As of the date on this article, a search of the Sexual Offender Records within just a 3-mile radius of my home listed over 100 sex offenders, many of whom first connect with victims online, possibly after viewing Internet pornography.

Internet Pornography is far from a victimless crime. And, a new .xxx domain won't help the situation.

Sources:

"Gated or X-rated?" Jonah Goldberg, Nick Schulz, National Review Online, 7/13/10.

"ICANN Board Approves Dot-XXX Top-level Domain for Porn," Peter Sayer, Yahoo News, 6/25/10.

"Porn use and child abuse," Tori DeAngelis, American Psychological Association, Vol. 40 No. 11, online 12/09, citing research from the April 2009 Journal of Family Violence Vol. 24 No. 3.

Sexual Offender Records of Hillsborough County, Florida.