To designate or not to designate. To keep minors off your adult website. That is the question. Attorney Jeffrey Douglas presented information at the Maui conference that may have some major significance for adult websites in the months and years ahead.
Douglas: There is a move by legislators who want to keep access of adult material away from minors on the web - to have an adult-designated extension. So, instead of dot.com, or dot. net., there would be a dot.xxx or the one they're using now is dot.adu for adult.
"This is a bill that hasn't been written yet, but the idea is that they would create an adult extension. It would be illegal, even they think, to require everyone who has nudity or sex on their site to use that. But, they want to create some incentives to make it attractive to people to do that.
"All we've seen is trial balloons. They haven't drafted it [yet]. The current spokesman for it is Christopher Cox, a Republican in Newport Beach. He is very effective. He's smart, articulate, telegenic. Anyway, his suggestion is that if you voluntarily adopted the 'adu' extension, you wouldn't have to be concerned about being prosecuted for a minor getting access to your site. Then, his argument would be, putting the burden on a parent to put software on the computer to keep it out of the site, would be duck soup. If the parent doesn't do that, and you've designated, then you wouldn't have to worry about anything.
"That's the notion. The attraction of it is that we'd be proactive. On the pure adult site, we don't have to worry about gray areas. The problem for the rest of the world that isn't a purely adult site, forinstance, if you're a professor of endocrinology and you want to talk about genital development, does that mean you have to designate your site 'adu' if a minor's caught jacking-off to some drawing? The pure First Amendment issues are significant. For our side, we don't really care. We just want a way of keeping minors out because it's bad press, we don't make any money off of them and it just uses up bandwidth. Our commercial interests and the interests of the people who want to shrink access to minors actually converge. That's the good part.
"The bad part is the same people like Christopher Cox who want to keep minors away, also have a deep and profound hostility to the industry. Once you have this neat designation then all of us have lined up to walk into the ghetto and give our addresses. History tells how bad that work. The risks to Cox's proposal are severalfold. It would mean that a big access point like AOL or a Netscape, the first portal by which a consumer gets to the Internet, they can exclude every single one of our sites with barely a flick of the switch. If, forinstance, AOL currently had the capacity to do it, I guarantee you, they would have. That would mean a quarter of the consumers would not have access to our product. If a couple go to buy their computer and the salesperson says if you buy this package it will go with AOL and that will exclude adult sites, the husband is going to turn to his wife and say, 'I want that package.' That's one risk.
"The other risk, even if you believe the economics of sex would prevent a large portal from doing it, there are surely other portals besides AOL, that would. After all, look how much momentum Blockbuster got by pretending they didn't carry sexually oriented material. The other risk is more insidious. That is, there will be means of taxation; there will be exclusion from physical locations just like most communities have limitations about how much X-rated material you can have within a 1,000 yards of graveyards, pawnbrokers and everything else. At the moment, if you have a web store, an Internet café, the government cannot limit what it is the consumers choose to view. So, there could be 40 booths and every single one of those booths, rather than looking at the Encyclopedia Britannica online, could be looking at our customers' products. There's no mechanism to prevent that from happening.
"You can't zone a web business, an Internet café, away from retail outlets. But, what you could do if there was an all-adult designation, is say, okay, any Internet café that does not block out all of the X-rated sections, has to be a 1,000 feet away from everything else. They'll say we're not talking about content-control here. We're talking about 'secondary effects'. And, of course, then there's taxation, and that's worth paying attention to. At the moment it's clear that it would be totally unconstitutional to tax X-rated content and not tax any other content. However, as we've watched the First Amendment just erode and Pap's being the most recent version, I just don't want to make it easier for them to find a new exception to the content restrictions on taxation and the First Amendment by having us aall voluntarily walk behind the walls of Krakow. But on the other hand we've got to do something.
"This proposal is just being circulated. No one is willing to take the first step right now because regulation of the Internet has such bad vibes to it. So that the two attempts to regulate content on the Internet - the Communications Decency Act and the Child Online Protection Act- both of those were significantly struck down as unconstitutional. And so the focus just keeps getting narrower and narrower. This is one of the versions. But no one's been able to come up with a proposal that's Constituional yet. So Cox's voluntary plan is a step in that direction. There's also that committee that was formed by the Child Online Protection Act, COPA, that was not one of the things struck down as unconstitutional. That's a committee to try and come up with ideas about restricting accesss of minors to adult product. Of course, there are no formal members of it from our community. But [FSC Executive Director] Bill Lyon attended the very first meeting as an interested party. This committee's probably going to accomplish nothing. They don't have any funding. It's all vountarily. I think the head of Netscape is the chairperson. These are very heavy hitters, but they'e not going to be able to spend hundreds of hours on this proposal, and the committee has to turn in a report by November. Chances are, nothing too horrible is going to come of this.
"But there are a lot of things like this out there. And no one's willing to take a move to some sort of significant or comprehensive regulation on the Internet until they get some feedback; and they don't want to piss off important, potential contributors to their campaign Things will come to a head on this subject probably after the election is over. Most of the committees will have formed reports and a new Congress will be formed. They will count noses and figure out how much strength they have for censorship. And depending how much strength they have, they're going to come with it."
G. Ross: "This sounds like wolf-in-sheep's clothing legislation. Bring in the kids."
Douglas: "It's got a lot of appeal to it. The truth is our clients don't want the kids on the Web. There's no downside to them on the first step of saying, 'sure'. But we got to figure out a way to do it it that doesn't give government so much power in the outcome."
