Baptist Press
March 21, 2011
Pornography now has its own online domain — to the chagrin of pro-family advocates.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees the creation of Web addresses, approved the establishment of the .xxx domain for sexually explicit material in a 9-3 vote at the March 18 meeting of its board in San Francisco.
The decision does not mean all pornographic sites will be limited to the .xxx domain, however. Porn businesses still will be able to use .com and other domains.
Pro-family leaders decried ICANN’s action.
“The addition of this new domain will just make the Internet even more of a moral minefield,” said Dwayne Hastings, vice president at the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. “Anything that further legitimizes pornography as a morally neutral endeavor is not good.”
Pat Trueman, chief executive officer of Morality in Media, said the new domain “would increase, not decrease[,] the spread of pornography on the Internet, causing even more harm to children, families and communities, and make ICANN complicit in that harm.”
