http://news.com.com/2010-1026-5176611.html The battle over triple 'x' March 22, 2004, 6:30 AM PT By Declan McCullagh By the end of this year, Internet users could have an extraordinarily convenient place to find pornography: a new .xxx top-level domain. Stuart Lawley, a 41-year-old entrepreneur in Jupiter, Fla., is the unlikely champion for the online equivalent of a red-light district. A British citizen, Lawley swears that he's no smut seller himself. "I have no current or historic links to the adult industry in any form," he asserts. That appears to be true. Lawley started Oneview.net, a U.K. business Internet provider, in the 1990s and cashed out at the height of the dot-com craze in March 2000. A profile in the Guardian newspaper a few months earlier pegged his net worth to be in the tens of millions of dollars. After a brief, sunny retirement in the Bahamas, where he learned how to golf and spear fish, Lawley moved to Florida and got the itch to get involved with the Internet again. "Sex is a very big area on the Internet," Lawley said. "Our research staff surprised me. I couldn't believe how prevalent it was and what the actual statistics were for the number of sites and the number of users." Under his proposal, submitted last week to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), .xxx domain names would be sold for $70 to $75 each. Child pornography would be verboten, but pretty much anything else would be permissible, Lawley said. "Apart from child pornography, which is completely illegal, we're really not in the content-monitoring business." [...remainder snipped...] _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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