MELBOURNE — Australia Sex Party President Fiona Patten said the new .XXX domain marks the beginning of the end for ICANN and its system of apportioning domain names and numbers.
“How on Earth can they approve a TLD that does not have the support of the relevant industry or GAC [Government Advisory Committee]?” Patten asked.
Patten said the Australian government and the country’s adult industry have been opposed to .XXX since its inception albeit for different reasons.
“Not only have they have ignored advice from us but they have ignored the advice of its own GAC, which included the Australian government,” she said.
“Even the religious groups were against this new domain being created. It was probably the first and only time we will ever see the sex industry, government and moral groups all lining up to agree on Internet censorship.”
She said that the decision was a huge blow to a free Internet and would increase censorship of the Internet in ways that could not have been imagined a few years ago.
“In Australia where we have no 1st Amendment, there is nothing stopping the government from making legislation to require all Australian adult companies to restrict their adult content to the .XXX domains,” she said.
“The Australian government also has a policy to introduce an ISP-based Internet filter requiring that all Australian ISPs block a large portion of adult content. It is not a big leap to assume that they will pretty much automatically block .XXX sites.”
For the first time, ICAAN also has approved content guidelines for a new domain, which places it in the position of being de facto regulators of parts of the Internet.
“The content that they will accept for .XXX will accommodate a considerable amount of Refused Classification material in Australia, which will almost certainly encourage the federal government to look at some sort of filtering arrangement,” she said.
Refused Classification is part of Australia’s rating system. Content that falls under the Refused Classification rating contains any type of violence involving sex and is banned for sale or distribution, though it isn’t illegal to possess such content.