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There is a war raging within the United States and around the world. The war isn’t to stamp out hunger or oppression it is to stamp out a legitimate business that is thriving on the Internet. The war is against adult websites and adult businesses in general. There have always been opponents to the adult industry and porn in particular. However, in recent years the U.S. government is viciously attacking the adult industry trying to tear it down bit by bit. There have been new laws drafted concerning age verification and model identification as well as new top-level domain extensions proposed. There are benefits to some aspects of these new laws and proposals but they are largely harmful to businesses that rely on the adult market to profit.

One of the recent proposals has been to create an .XXX top-level domain and to require all websites containing adult material to operate within this TLD and no longer utilize a .com extension. The benefit to this according to the government would be to ensure that when a surfer visits the .XXX they automatically know that they will encounter adult material. The government states that this is to protect minors from harmful website content and to allow parents to block such domains from being accessed. This would be an amazing benefit for concerned parents and website owners trying to protect the world’s youths. However, it will impinge upon the website owner’s ability to fairly compete within the world-wide-web marketplace. It will allow Internet service providers and even entire countries to block access to these sites and not allow adult visitors to access the sites. This could and would prove to be very harmful to the bottom line of the websites considering the traffic flow has the potential to decrease significantly. This could actually create an unfair trade practice within the Internet marketplace and allow other entrepreneurs to lobby state governments and ISP’s to block the .XXX extension therefore allowing their businesses to provide other avenues of entertainment for Internet surfers. There are alternate options that would be much less devastating to the bottom line of the websites and would allow less governmental control over the adult industry.

One of the less harmful proposals has been a parental warning label similar to what the record and movie industry currently does. It would allow an immediate recognition via a standardized label that would give the surfer the knowledge of the type of content they will find on a website. There are services like Net Nanny that currently do something similar to this but they are not foolproof and they can be quite costly for both the website owner and surfer and there are just not enough people willing to pay for the service. The parents would rather have the government and other outside influences parenting their children instead of taking the time to raise and educate and supervise the children themselves.

The other major issue that has been brewing between the adult industry and the U.S. government is the proposed changes to the 2257 laws. Currently there are age verification processes that were instituted several years ago that provide for a photographer or producer to maintain all identification records of any actor or actress that shoots adult material. However, some of the changes that the government has proposed is that the records of those actors and actresses now must be provided to anyone that displays the content on a website that they operate. There are several flaws in this stipulation including the ability for anyone to find out a model’s real name, social security number, address and other personally identifying information. This could prove very dangerous for the actors and actresses considering most of them use stage names to conceal their identities. It would allow stalkers and protesters unprecedented access to them and could put their lives in danger. When a photographer collects the proper documentation for a model and maintains those records as well as providing all those records to the company that has licensed the content it should be sufficient to have them housed and documented in two locations rather than in thousands of locations as per the current changes that have been proposed by requiring webmasters to maintain the records as well. If they insist on having the records maintained by each and every website that publishes the content perhaps there should be some kind of digital encryption and if an audit of records is performed the content producer or sponsor program could provide a key to unlock the records. There are alternate solutions and if the government would only have a round-table discussion with a few industry leaders a viable solution to protect the children could be reached without compromising any party involved.

The government is right in its desire to protect children from material that they are not old enough to absorb or understand. However, putting models or a businesses livelihood in jeopardy is not the solution. An enormous part of the adult industry is concerned with ensuring that children are protected. Most webmasters and entertainers do have children and are concerned that they are protected. However, the government does not want to assist with the regulation that is already occurring they want to impose suffocating limitations on our ability to conduct daily business. As with any other business there are good and bad apples but according to the government and an old adage, “One bad apple spoils the bunch”.