Triple-X suffix unlikely to lure porn barons away from orgy

The internet can seem like a sprawling orgy of porn. According to Internet Filter Review, it hosts four million pornographic sites (12 per cent of the total number of websites) and almost 400 million pornographic pages. No less than 25 per cent of all search engine requests - that is 70 million - relate to sex.

Enter clean-up campaigner Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). This non-profit group that oversees internet domains plans to create a '.xxx' domain for pornography only.

Despite online porn's plague proportions, the response to ICANN's announcement has been a welter of scepticism and scorn. For starters, the price of one of the proposed domains will be US$60: about 10 times higher than for any other suffix. That makes ICANN look like an American TV evangelist trying to convince you that he and Jesus deserve your money. In short, the scheme could be a nice little earner.

And it will almost certainly fail to achieve anything worthwhile. The key reason is simple - the proposal is voluntary.

Why will the Svengalis who milk the US$60 billion global industry for all it is worth choose to pay to adopt the domain name when it seems to do them no favours? In fact, it looks like a headache because it means their sites will be segregated like sex shops on the fringe of a city, creating a ghetto and sharpening the stigma that already bedevils erotica.

The triple-X suffix makes matters worse because it smacks of extremity. It suggests that the content is hardcore only, which may scare away users who prefer to flirt with light material. Naughty office oglers may be thwarted too because it will be easy for bosses to block the sites.