Online porn set for dedicated domain name

A European Web publisher is planning to set up a .sex domain name for Web sites.

Felix Olin, publisher of Weekly MLM News, says that a .sex Web address would help parents and governments to screen out pornographic material.

In his application to Iana (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), which controls top-level domain names, Olin offered to set the servers up himself. As a domain name registrar, he would charge adult sites for the privilege of having a .sex address.

In his letter to Iana, Olin said: "We are not out for the money, though. We are just interested in helping the online adult industry out, and also helping worried parents regarding their children surfing adult Web sites and viewing x-rated material."

Weekly MLM News researches online marketing fraud. It is sponsored by publisher, AxAx Internet, of which Felix Olin is vice president.

Olin told Silicon.com: "I'm afraid many have requested to register the .sex domain via Iana, so I do not think our company has a bigger chance than anyone else. But if we get to handle it, then we are going to add it to filter lists in all Web browsers and child protection software."

But David Kerr, CEO of the Internet Watch Foundation in the UK, said there are better ways of protecting children. He said: "There are more sophisticated ideas in the pipeline - like the Recreational Software Advisory Council, which adds filtering tags retrospectively to Web sites."

Kerr said Olin's scheme would be held back by the time and cost of reregistering adult sites. "Even successful filtering schemes have only registered about 100,000 of them," He said.

Iana, under contract to the US government, is not accepting domain name applications at present. But new domain names are likely to be on the agenda of its replacement, Icann, later this year.