Following what executive director Bill Lyon called a "great meeting…(with) so much passion on both sides," Free Speech Coalition will spend thirty days sending information from all sides on the question of a separate .xxx Internet domain, before calling for a binding vote one or the other way from its membership.
"We're going to…be sending various viewpoints via e-mail to all of the membership, we'll send viewpoints both pro and con," said executive director Bill Lyon to AVN.com the morning after the August 21 FSC general meeting on the issue. "At the end we will send out ballots to our members, and that will be the members' decision. The Board of Directors will have to decide in the final analysis, but the board represents the will of the members."
The adult industry's most visible lobbying arm has stood against the separate adult domain in the past, but they have been approached of late by ICM Registry, a Canadian-based domain registrar which is pushing for the .xxx domain. FSC also began receiving an increasing amount of interest in the idea from its members, at least to the point where the lobby began to think it wise to work for a formal vote on the issue.
Lyon said the August 21 meeting attracted double the audience of the previous FSC general meeting on health issues. But a nonbonding, show-of-hands vote suggested a somewhat mixed result on the issue, according to Lyon. The show of hands suggested a narrow majority in favor of the .xxx domain, but that included, he said, adult Internet people attending the meeting who weren't FSC members.
"If we consider the show of hands we had in Florida at Internext, which was totally Internet people," he said, referring to a seminar discussion on the issue, "they were about 75 percent against."
Those in the adult industry who aren't enthusiastic about the .xxx domain cite potential problems like the so-called "ghettoization" of adult Internet space, whether even making it voluntary wouldn't still provoke the government – in the U.S. or elsewhere – to make it a mandatory cyberlocale for adult material, and a question of whether endorsing it might not compromise FSC lobbying efforts in the future.
ICM Registry, whose representatives also attended the meeting, has argued that a separate and voluntary .xxx domain would not lead to the "ghettoization" of the Internet as some in the adult industry have said they fear. ICM president Jason Hendeles told AVN.com a week before the August 21 meeting that there was "just not going to be a way to move or force or pressure two million adult Websites to just not exist anymore, or to move into one place."
Hendeles could not be reached for comment before this story went to press.
Lyon said FSC's leadership and membership still has to think very carefully about all the actual and potential ramifications of a separate adult Internet domain. "I say at the moment the people not for it exceed the people who are for it, but I think we have a long way to go," he said, reflecting on the August 21 meeting. "We have to really to due diligence on this. There may be legal ramifications for FSC that need to be carefully considered in order for us to honor our nonprofit status and be able to lobby effectively for the industry."
Lyon was encouraged most, however, by the fact that the .xxx domain got as full an airing in terms of "the critical problems we might face down the road in this thing" as any issue has ever received during an FSC meeting. Lyon himself has not budged from his opposition to the .xxx domain.
"It may be easy and expedient to form this kind of thing now to make it look to the government as if we are doing domething positive," he said, "but we have to be sure of where this road is going to lead.
"There's an old saying, before you make a deal with the government, talk to an American Indian. It's time for us to be really careful," Lyon continued. "We all agree that we need to come together as an industry, Internet, video, distributors, retailers, talent, everybody needs to come together. But we must be very sure that the face we put on and present to the outside world really will protect us and serve us well."
FSC member Gary Kremen, himself only too familiar with government and legal issues through his long right to recover his once-stolen Sex.com domain, said he thinks minds were changed at the meeting. "I must have talked to ten whose minds were changed," he said. "I still haven't made up my mind. I can see some positives and I can see some terrible things happening with a separate domain."
But he added that the August 21 meeting featured a lot of raised voices but a lot of eye-opening for adult Internet workers getting, in some cases, their first real taste of knowing what their predecessors in the early days of adult video experienced.
"I realized these video guys have a long history," Kremen said. "And they remember when things were bad in the 60s and the 70s and its good that many of them were there, and the people who are from the Internet, they might night have that kind of institutional memory of the government cracking down."
But Kremen also suggested that the government isn't the only potential party who could force adult Internet sites or operations into a "voluntary" .xxx domain.
"The movie ratings are completely voluntary, and the movies can show whatever they want, but what happens is, people write into their lease that you can't show NC17 or X, so it indirectly forces you to do it," he said. "You can imagine in this case AOL or someone saying we're blocking .xxx, or all the ISPs saying we're blocking .xxx, we're doing something for the children. Other parties than the government could enforce this."
