The Nanny Notes

Allen Warner

Russ Warner

Smartphones and tablets can be hazardous to your health. Consider that truck drivers and cabbies, police officers and road construction workers, and doctors and nurses like Facebook, texting, and Angry Birds just as much as you. And they do these things while at work, just like you.

Russ Warner

After years of rejecting its applications, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) decided to give the adult entertainment industry the .xxx top-level domain, a move that results in the establishment of a virtual red-light district on the Web.  This week, the sale began.

Today, most web site names end in .com, .net, .org, .gov, or .edu.  The implication of this proposed change is that an adult content / pornographic web site will have the option of using the .xxx domain name.  At first glance, this would seem to make it easier for parents or parental controls software vendors to monitor and protect children and teens from objectionable sites. 

In reality, this change would potentially make it very easy for a curious child to quickly get into trouble.  I envision children getting immediate access to X-rated materials by innocently typing in almost any word with a .xxx name.  Exposure to such images is not quickly forgotten or erased from a young memory.

Knowing how well-funded corrupt businesses operate, I expect pornographers to co-locate their content on existing .comdomains and also on the new .xxx domain, thus increasing the prevalence of pornography sites.  Pornographers won’t likely voluntary give up their successful .com addresses to locate solely on the .xxx domain.  As a result, pornography content will be more pervasive. 

As the owner of a few reputable web sites, I have considered what will happen when .xxx domains go on sale and reputablecompanies are a bit slow to purchase their .xxx domain name to simply protect them.  Our company will jump to buy www.netnanny.xxx to avoid the trouble a pornographer can wreak if they do any URL spoofing based on our brand name.

The other overriding challenge is that there is no real legal regulation, in practice.  Indeed, Internet pornography is hardcore obscenity and it is illegal.  But it is so ubiquitous, it is not usually prosecuted.

It’s not likely that Congress would be able to pass a law requiring pornographers to conform to the .xxx domain.  And even if passed, such as law would be relatively unenforced in federal court, if the past is an indicator of the future. Historically, efforts by Congress to regulate smut on the Internet have not been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In short, as .xxx domains go on sale, we will see an increase in the pervasiveness of pornography and its accessibility.  Ironically, the Internet is used for so many good things too.

Russ Warner

This week, Grant Smith, a professor from the University of Utah was arrested for viewing child pornography while on a flight from Salt Lake to Boston.  A courageous passenger seated behind Mr. Smith took a photo of him allegedly watching child pornography on his laptop. The flight crew was notified and Boston police officers were waiting for Mr. Smith as he deplaned.  He was detained, his computer and phone searched, and then arrested. It's important to note that possession of even one image of child pornography is a felony.  

This brazen display of the professor's need to view pornography shows the power of the addiction.

Child pornography involves a very disturbing and dark subculture of Internet pornography. Child pornography is a fast-growing business and the content is becoming much more graphic and violent.  Because of the severity of the penalty for possession, child pornographers typically swap and share images on peer-to-peer networks to avoid publicizing their addiction by paying on commercial pornography sites.

The most disturbing issue is that of those arrested for possession of child pornography, 40 percent had both sexually victimized children and were in possession of child pornography.

Of those arrested between 2000 and 2001, 83 percent had images involving children between the ages of 6 and 12, while 39 percent had images of children between the ages of 3 and 5, and quite sadly,  19% had images of infants and toddlers under the age of 3 yrs old.  I can only imagine that the statistics are worse after ten years of continued devolution.

According to Mark Shurtleff, attorney general of Utah, of those arrested for possession of child pornography, most started out viewing adult pornography but gradually progressed to more hard core images as the addiction advanced. (Source: KPCW radio interview on 30 Nov. 2011 at 9 a.m.)

As parents, we need to be alert to the fact that sexual predators are online in search of prey.  Children are the target and must be protected.  Parental controls software is the best method a parent has in the fight against this sickening trend.  Net Nanny Mobile will launch in January to help protect kids and teens using smartphones and iPods.

(Source: National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Child Pornography Possessors Arrested in Internet-Related Crimes: Findings from the National Juvenile Online Victimization Study, 2005).

I work for ContentWatch and all opinions expressed here are my own.