Under the Lieberman proposal, in addition to the well known dot.com, dot.org, dot.net and dot.edu domain name groups, there would be a new dot.sex group.
The advantage to this proposal is that it would no longer be necessary for parents and their children to engage in long and unproductive searches for hard core sex, as the truly hard core sites would be readily available because any such site would end with dot.sex, such as childrens.sex for example.
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Last year, Senator Lieberman became known as the "Man Without Sin" because he was the one who cast the first stone at President Clinton.
"This idea, which would in effect establish a virtual red-light district ... has a lot of merit, for rather than constricting the Net's open architecture it would capitalize on it to effectively shield children from pornography, and it would do so without encroaching on the rights of adults to have access to protected speech," Lieberman said at the third meeting of the federal Commission on Child Online Protection.
Lieberman stressed that he voted against the Communications Decency Act, which later was found to be unconstitutional. Lieberman characterized his support for a sex-domain as a "suggestion" to the commission, which under federal law is tasked with making "making legislative recommendations to the Congress."
The idea of new domains has surfaced before, including during testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee, but persuading non-U.S. smutrepreneurs to make the switch might be a problem. Another hitch: Congress no longer has explicit authority over top-level domains after the Clinton administration ceded control to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
"The Internet is a global medium, and a global medium would call for an international buy-in of domain names," said panelist Roger Cochetti, senior vice president and chief policy officer at Network Solutions.