Re: Facebook censorship and internet porn

On Dec 11, 2010, at 8:56 PM, Bruce Bostwick wrote:

> This was made abundantly clear by the somewhat paradoxical  
> maneuvering surrounding the proposed .xxx TLD for porn domains. The  
> idea of a porn-specific TLD made perfect sense, as it would have  
> provided a place where interested adults could easily have gone  
> looking for whatever they wanted, and would have made the process of  
> blocking porn from underage computer users (or any others whom  
> society feels the need to protect from porn) relatively trivial and  
> straightforward.

And -- accepts karma hit for responding to own post, but bear with me  
-- the devil's advocate position on the .xxx TLD case:

The "any others whom society feels the need to protect from porn" is a  
*huge* loophole, and given some aspects of the current political  
climate, it's not entirely unreasonable to imagine a possible future  
society where that one clause amounts to everyone that certain  
religious sects have under their power at any given time, or in the  
worst case, everyone, period.  Putting all the porn domains in one  
easily-filtered place could in some circumstances be a prelude to  
relatively simple total censorship of the entire industry.

So there are extremes at both end of the spectrum, and the resistance  
to implementation of an .xxx TLD, specifically, is probably reasonable  
too, from at least some perspectives .. especially if it comes with  
the stipulation that all "porn", as legally defined, must only exist  
in domains within that TLD.  And that simply because free speech only  
allowed in "free speech zones" is not truly free in any real sense,  
particularly if the "free speech zones" are then conveniently located  
where they can have no possible actual impact.

There's a happy medium in there somewhere, and ultimately, it's futile  
to try to apply technical measures to problems that are more social  
than technical in nature.  Law has never succeeded in addressing  
morality, or even ethics for that matter, and it's going to continue  
to fail.  So I have no solution to the problem of bad actors making  
life miserable every way they can.  As I said, it's a formidable  
philosophical problem ..

"Listen, when you get home tonight, you're gonna be confronted by the  
instinct to drink a lot. Trust that instinct. Manage the pain. Don't  
try to be a hero." -- Toby Ziegler