Being the tallest and boldest member of my Venture Scout unit, I was historically tasked with purchasing a stack of grot – clearing newsagent top shelves – while on our way to various European destinations. Our coach journeys were a mid-’90s proxy of today’s internet. You could avoid sleaze if you tried hard and pointed your eyes in the right direction, but it was inevitable that you’d get a bum thrust forcibly into your line of vision sooner or later.
Odd as it was to be travelling with a horde of young adults, swapping crunchy jazz mags around, I wouldn’t have done it any other way. Printed obscenity had as much right to be in that coach as the kid who carefully deliberated before every step taken while hiking, or the squid-like being who creepily invaded every encounter with a real-life lady and instantly scared them off.
In the words of Dr Cox from the TV show Scrubs, “If they took all the porn off the internet, there’d be only one site left and it would be called bringbacktheporn.com”. So it was for us. If we hadn’t filled our spare seat with obscenity, we might have had to look at each other.
Anyway. Good news for fans of healthy social interaction and dislikers of adult material alike: it looks like the internet is finally about to get its own smutseat. The .xxx domain, plans for which were ditched some years ago but resurrected in late June by Icann, is designed as a domain where everything indecent can be squirrelled away, saving countless pairs of permanently altered eyes from seeing bits of the human anatomy that were definitely never meant to be photographed.
It won’t work, of course. Why would it? What is to stop the gentleman’s literature business from continuing to use gratuitously distributed .com domains as well as those on .xxx? Who will watch over the use of such new domains as well as existing .coms, considering Icann dropped the original call for a .xxx domain back in 2005 because it felt it would be called on to police it? I’d say the answer, sadly, is nobody. This sort of content will not be ‘policed’ as much as it will be simply ‘blocked’ by the new breed of slap-happy ISP. I’m all for the UK’s subtle, mostly unnoticed denial of the most extreme material. As much as I hate censorship, I think the Internet Watch Foundation does an excellent job of cleansing the web of entirely inappropriate content. By this I mean that the worst of the web definitely doesn’t trouble me often. I don’t actually go looking for it to see if the IWF has done its job, mind you. Especially not at work.
But ISPs are coming under more and more direct pressure from lobbying groups. A court order means Irish ISP Eircom has blocked The Pirate Bay, while odd decision making means the Irish end of O2 has blocked meme-heavy image-sharing site Imgur. It won’t be long before this sort of cave-in culture leaks across the sea into the UK. The new domain will no doubt aid in providing useful in-browser content warnings, but a blanket ban of .xxx sites is not only possible, it’s inevitable. And not just in prudish or sensitive countries, but in progressive, clever ones like ours. The minority will always make a big enough fuss to make such things happen.
Here’s what I’d do, and what you should do too: ignore .xxx altogether. It’s not going to make the blindest bit of difference. Has your life been enriched by .biz sites? Has their introduction caused businesses to drop their .coms in their favour? No. Will .xxx cause dirty pornographers to abandon .com in favour of another easily filtered, slightly more awkward domain name that will lend them more scrutiny and less flexibility? Again, no. The filth shall fly, as it always has. The trick is to know when to look away.
