Adult Zone is the Way to Secure the Internet

According to Bruce Watson (2000), isolating adult websites in separate domains would make the Internet more secured and safer for children who are online. Currently, the Internet as a huge worldwide network has a variety of domains; they classify websites’ contents based on their organizations’ activities dot COM, Dot NET and dot EDU are such examples of internet domains. The dot Adult domain may save and isolate children from inappropriate websites’ contents, and it may provide a safer Internet environment.

According to Bruce Watson (2000), isolating adult websites in separate domains would make the Internet more secured and safer for children who are online. Currently, the Internet as a huge worldwide network has a variety of domains; they classify websites’ contents based on their organizations’ activities. For example commercial websites have the domain of dot COM, and it is designed to hold companies’ websites for trading. 

The dot GOV is another example serving government organizations and agencies. In Watson papers the dot ADULT would serve adult websites concerned with publishing mature materials inappropriate to minors and children. Child protection is considered as a primary job under parents’ responsibility. They should teach their children to distinguish risks such as the danger of tobacco and alcohol. However, Internet protection is not limited on parents, but it extended to cover teacher in schools, librarians, Internet industry and the law enforcement. Thus, separate domain for adult sites may match these responsibilities to make a safer Internet environment.

Filtering on the Internet still depends on a word link which may give improper answers to block undesired websites. Grouping all adult sites in one list is a big challenge – even with intelligent programs such as Spider; filtering of the Internet adult sites on the Internet would be impossible for the huge number of new websites and existing sites. Thus, filtering is not a sufficient way in blocking adult websites.

With an adult zone the binary questions would be a significant solution to isolate adult sites; these solutions are based on ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ questions to prevent adult sites’ contents. For example, “Block Adult Domains” is a binary question that can be added to the parental control setting within a browsers’ options, and by selecting ‘Yes’ all adult sites would be blocked and unreachable. Therefore, zoning of adult websites “dot adult” would make children protection much easier, and it would provide a range of net security and prevent obscenities which are already presented on the internet websites.

Famous porn websites already have government agreements which prevent any harmful elements to minors and prevent minors to browse any mature materials. Hence, the government could start with these porn websites to mandate them to the dot ADULT zone. Moreover, they could play a big role in developing the adult zone by taking an early step and posting their websites’ contents within adults’ domains; therefore, this may lead current and new adult websites to come up with the adult zone.

However, some resisters of the adult zone idea believe that it may increase minors’ attraction to adult websites and it would make the searching for them easier and reachable. In fact, latest search engine reports show that ‘SEX’ and ‘PORN’ words are closely at the top of searching list terms, consequently, results lead directly to free samples of porno materials. The attraction to these adult websites already exists by internet users; therefore, adult zone would make the process of isolating adults’ websites from minors easier and controllable.

Works Cited:

Watson, B. (2000, June 08). Commission on Child Online Protection. Retrieved 05 10, 2008, from The COPA Commission: http://www.copacommission.org/meetings/hearing1/watson.test.pdf