Net to have red-light district

It's good and bad for online kids. On one hand, they'll be able to find smut more easily, on the other it's easier to restrict them from a defined adult-only area. What I'm referring to is the news that a dot-xxx domain has just been approved by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers), the international body that oversees the Net's addressing system (including .com, .org, etc.). "Sexually explicit sites will be encouraged to move to the new domains to make it easier for people to filter and avoid them," the BBC reports. The Toronto-based non-profit International Foundation for Online Responsibility (IFFOR) and its ICM Registry will run .xxx as "a voluntary adult top-level domain," meaning porn operators don't have to use it, but there will be incentives; the most effective one IFFOR is pushing for is credit-card companies like Visa and MasterCard working with adult-content companies only in the dot-xxx area. Child pornography, which is illegal, will not appear/be accepted in the domain. According to the Associated Press, "ICM contends the 'xxx' Web addresses, which it plans to sell for $60 a year [around 10 times the cost of most domain registrations], will protect children from online smut if adult sites voluntarily adopt the suffix so filtering software used by families can more effectively block access to those sites." It certainly won't be the cure-all in kids' online safety, but - as one expert told me - "it's just another tool in parents' toolbox." Here's earlier, more in-depth coverage of this development, long in the works) and CNET.