Dear Juliana -

Keep up the good fight. The only effective tool to stop or slow down Porn is the lesson from Tobacco Industry. Sin Taxes.

A tax on Porn - (video sales, rentals, cable, websites, movie theaters) is the only thing to slow down the Adult Entertainment Industry. Also it will raise funds for the state to launch public awareness campaigns.

And an ostensibly progressive voice turns tail and runs as quickly as possible from any sense of personal responsibility for what one's children do and see, foisting the burden onto free, adult individuals who are not making any attempt to market their products to said children. As one who considers himself a progressive, it's talk like this that makes me fear for the American political process, on both sides of the aisle.

How can parents monitor their kids 24/7 - when they goto their friends place, their secret clubhouse in the canyon, or when they swap Porn Ipods with their buddies in the back of the school bus.

Heck I have no idea what kind of filters are in place at his school or the local library.

Not to mention that filters on Google, Yahoo and MSN are so easily disabled.

If the Adult Entertainment Group wants to make porn so freely available to the whole world, then they have to do more to help parents protect their children.

Notice that I did not say eliminate porn, I'm just asking for better safeguards.

What an appaling entry to read in the MojoBlog. I thought we had gotten away from the victorian-as-liberal form of quasi-feminism. The sum total of harm attributable to porn is still zero, isn't it? A progressive should call this legislation what it is: unworkable, unnecessary and undesirable. It's a conservative fantasy to infantilize everything in society. Horrible.

Did everyone completly miss the point?
" specifies that any web "communication" including images, articles, recordings or other "obscene matter.."

#1) Define Obcene?

#2) This is just not about Naughty Pictures. This means any written stories that someone may judge obcene. Blog about your Hot Date and you'll be looking at fines, imprisonment?

#3) Once you start trying to "regulate" the internet in this way, don't ever say anything about China's controls on free-speech or search engines "ratting people out". It's just a very fine line away.

A "step in the right direction"?

I too am very surprised to see this position taken on MojoBlog. First of all, it's not clear to me that pornographic material is inherently harmful to anyone, adult or child, except perhaps to those who carry the Victorian notion that sex itself is something wicked.

No doubt many will disagree with me on that point, but in any case, there is no justification for separating and specially regulating speech that some find objectionable.

The Free Speech Coalition described the situation well with the word "ghettoize". Just as the first step in eliminating a segment of 1940's German society was to force them to register and be segregated from the rest of the population, distinguishing some speech as controlled and moving it to a special location is the first step in further regulating it and eventually eliminating it.

On another note, establishing a new TLD will not be in any way effective in preventing children with unsupervised Internet access from circumventing filters (proxies and other methods of bypassing filters abound and would not be affected). Internet filtering is a problem that cannot be made secure. If parents want to know what their children are doing on the Internet, for better or for worse, the only way is to watch them.

Are you sure 81628 about this?!?