The movement for a separate Internet domain for adult entertainment is getting a big push from a North Carolina grandmother who was so shocked when her granddaughter opened an adult site by mistake that she started an online group to gather support for the concept.
Mary Conyers' Protect Every Child is looking to persuade lawmakers to require all sites featuring adult material to stop using dot-com or dot-net and start using dot-xxx. She is just as adamant, apparently, that her aim not stamp out adult materials.
"We know we can't do that," Conyers told a North Carolina television station. "We just want to put it where people won't stumble across it. Teens are still going to find porn, but it will be a choice."
The Website includes a page featuring links for contacts to Capitol Hill lawmakers and even the White House, as well as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and several media outlets.
"[F]reedom includes the right to protect our children from strangers that enter our homes uninvited," Conyers says on the Website. "These strangers we call pornography, and they enter through our computers. This happened to my granddaughter when she added an 's' to the word 'teen' while looking for a site for teens. With one click of the mouse, our children are innocently pulled into this adult world."
ICANN is scheduled to decide on whether dot-xxx gets the formal green light in September. U.S. Networks computer experts are among those who think it won't be that difficult, technically speaking, to move the adult Internet to a dot-xxx domain.. And while some associated with adult entertainment, like Free Speech Coalition, have refused to endorse the dot-xxx domain idea, others – including three adult entertainment heavyweights: LFP, Vivid Video, and Private Media Group – have endorsed the idea.
Protect Every Child is said now to have members in 39 U.S. states as well as in Puerto Rico, Zambia, Israel, China, Canada, and Australia. They have also received support and encouragement from such groups as Parry Aftab's WiredSafety.org and several other child advocacy groups, in addition to the U.S. Internet Crime Task Force.
