It looks like the Bush Administration has made another in a long line of second-term bone-headed moves:

Newly released e-mails allege U.S. government officials pressured a leading Internet authority into voting against creating a kind of red-light district for adult Web sites.

The apparent involvement of the U.S. Department of Commerce, President Bush’s chief political operative Karl Rove and others is significant.

If true, it means the U.S. government violated terms of a complicated arrangement it has with ICANN, the Internet authority that voted 9-5 two weeks ago not to OK the .xxx proposal.

What ICM Registry, the company that proposed the top-level domain, wanted was permission to distribute Web addresses that ended in .xxx to be used exclusively by adult entertainment sites.

The proposal won support from Wired Safety and Wired Kids, the Internet Content Rating Association and other child-safety groups because of the way it was expected to make it easier for authorities and parents to police the Internet.

Detractors said it just would make it that much easier to find porn.

ICANN voted it down 9-5, after seemingly being on track to approve of the effort.

Since the ICANN vote, ICM Registry has made public e-mails, here in PDF form, between members of the Department of Commerce, various other branches of the federal government and ICANN.

The company had asked for the communications earlier under a Freedom of Information Act request.

After discovering many of the e-mails had been redacted, ICM on May 19 asked a judge in Washington, D.C., to force the Department of Commerce to fill in the blanks.

ICM says the e-mails show how the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce, was subjected to intense pressure to intervene on behalf of the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, two socially conservative lobbying organizations.

Source

Preventing the creation of a top-level domain which would make it very easy for parents to prevent their children from straying onto objectionable web sites is not the thing a conservative administration wants to do. No doubt groups like Focus on the Family want to rid the Internet of pornography altogether, but the Internet is not owned by any one government so that just isn’t possible. The very best you can do is make pornography easily identifiable so that people who choose to do so can avoid it. The creation of a “.XXX” domain would do this.

Is it just me, or has the Bush Administration lost it’s ability to use common sense?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 24th, 2006 at 12:35 pm by Nick, and is filed under Computers, Culture War, Government, Internet, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.