As far as I know, rumors to the contrary about certain Scandinavian
> countries notwithstanding, child pornography is completely illegal
> throughout the world.
Quite true, but the definition varies significantly at the margins. In the aforementions countries, pictures of nude 17 year olds are legal erotica, in the US they're child p*rn.
Among the bad things about .XXX is that it makes it much easier for governments to shunt indecent content off to a ghetto, for varying local definitions of "indecent". I'm sure there are plenty of places in the U.S. where they'd love to push nasty topics like contraception and homosexuality into .XXX, purely to protect innocent children.
R's,
John
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But they do that now, with filtering programs. Filtering, never a perfect solution, now can filter out the sexual topic of women's breasts, but the problem is it cannot seem to understand why 'breast cancer' is not the same thing as 'I love to look at and fantasize on those breasts'. But to the filter writers, what is there that you cannot understand about '.xxx'? If I write a filter and I say that a dot followed by three x's goes no further into my computer, then other things like the context in which 'breasts' or 'sex' or whatever is to be taken becomes a moot point doesn't it? If the real problem that '.xxx' makes writing and main- taining filtering programs too easy? If local communities or govern- ments decide what is to go into '.xxx' it would seem to me that all the fuss over effective and ineffective filtering would go away. PAT]