The adult Internet and the dot-kids Internet domain are subjects of scheduled back-to-back hearings by the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection early May 6.
The dot-kids hearing is scheduled for 9:30 a.m., according to Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe Barton (R-Texas), with the adult Internet hearing - titled "Online Pornography: Closing The Doors on Pervasive Smut" - scheduled to follow, and both hearings are planned for Webcast.
The hearings come in the wake of the Justice Department's announced crackdown on adult cyberspace.
"My guess," said First Amendment and adult entertainment attorney Lawrence G. Walters to AVNOnline.com, "is that they'll consider the pending resolution calling for increased enforcement of obscenity laws, and the announced war on adult Websites by the Justice Department. This is a hot topic on Capitol Hill, during this election cycle; and I suspect we'll be seeing more and more of these committee hearings on the issue."
WiredSafety.org leader Parry Aftab said she hadn't yet been asked to testify at the dot-kids domain hearing. "They're trying to fix [dot-kids]," she told AVNOnline.com. "Right now, there's not a significant buy-in with dot.kids.us.
"Part of the problem is that there are legal liability issues for the sites that are greater than they face in other places. Also, there are marketing issues involved, in that a lot of the sites in the children's space don't make their money off subscriptions, they make it on referrals, that kind of thing. And there were restrictions on how they can do that."
Aftab also said she's all but ready to take the gloves off on the question of adult Websites that deceive children into visiting them. She said that if she does end up being invited to testify to the dot-kids subcommittee hearing - she said she doesn't testify at such hearings unless she's invited - she intended to bring the issue up.
"I had previously stayed out of porn and kids with online safety," she said. "But the intentional marketing of porn to children by some of the porn operators has been the straw that's broken the camel's back. Some of the pop-ups, the abuse of marketing tactics, there are too many of them. And I'm tired of the guys who are trying to trick kids into it."
Aftab emphasized that she has no intention of working against adults' rights to view adult materials. "I'm all for adults having the right to porn," she said. "I stay out of that. If I do testify, it's going to be about the inadvertent exposure and the deceptive marketing. We need to do something about that today. And I think that we [should] approach this, not on the content issue... but from the perspective of [deceptive marketing]."
