Congress Says Porn Domain Names Must Be Clear
from the hmm... dept
Congress today passed some legislation having to do with online porn. Among the less talked about clauses is one that says you can go to jail if your domain name is “misleading” and has porn on it. At first, this doesn’t seem like a huge deal, but when you begin to think through the details, it can be problematic. First, it’s incredibly subjective on both important words. How do you determine what is “misleading”. How do you determine what is “porn”? In both cases there will be some situations where it’s obvious, but there are plenty of “fine line” cases that will depend very much on interpretation. What if someone puts up “erotic art” on a website that uses their name as the domain name. It could be considered misleading because the domain name doesn’t make it clear what the content is. It could be considered porn, depending on local standards. However, most people would have trouble believing the owner of such a site deserves to spend time in jail. There are just too many ways this law can be abused – and having seen how previous internet laws have been abused, I have a hard time believing this one won’t be.
Comments on “Congress Says Porn Domain Names Must Be Clear”
The real reason
They want whitehouse.com
Re: The real reason
If that’s the case, how will they be compensated? This is essentially a governement takeover of the site, so won’t the government have to reimburse them for revenue lost as a result of changing content?
Bad link, Mike! :P
it just says http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030410/a href=
Re: Bad link, Mike! :P
Oops! Fixed the bad link. Thanks for pointing that out.
Interpretation
The question is not who will be affected by this law, but who will be prosecuted. It’s obvious that the executive branch has an interest in this legislation. With it they can shut down sites they don’t agree with, alleging pornographic content. However, I feel that this ultimately may not hold up in court.
A workable alternative (that I’ve considered for years), is to require adult websites to use an alternate domain like “.xxx”. This would require 2 things:
1st, a legitimate interest in making for-profit adult entertainment sites easier to determine (thereby acknowledging that Internet pornography as a legitimate business.)
And 2, a governing body to regulate and enforce this statute. I don’t know if ICANN would be up to this task, so it may require more bureaucracy.