Is it time to create a 'top shelf' for the Internet?

It is an unavoidable ethical complication: sometimes good things come out of bad. Medical research, for example, has been assisted by murdering grave robbers and the horrific experiments of wartime scientists.

And so, on the web, it is undeniable that Internet technology has been pushed ahead by the demands of the pornography industry, which has enthusiastically driven the research and development of commonly accepted and valuable web tools such as video streaming.

Like so many elements of the free market - not to mention the banking sector - those making the money are happy to push ahead, while those with rational reservations make comments from the sideline that are accepted but not acted upon. Thus, we find ourselves with a generation now that has access to pornography that was unthinkable even ten years ago. No one can be sure where this will lead but you will not find many people arguing that it is a good thing.

To be clear, this blog is not about the pros and cons of pornography. However, I think I would be comfortable stating that the industry that promotes and produces it is, by and large, an unpleasant one, driven by high profits and with little regard for the people it uses. And I am consequently comfortable stating that in matters of regulation, I would think twice about consulting them or listening to their arguments about how they keep their content away from young people. (How many 15 year old boys are going to pay heed to a 'gatekeeper question' asking if they are 18?)

I am writing about this because last week, ICAAN, which is the body that manages 'top level domains' such as .co.uk, .com and .ac.uk, has begun the process of introducing a .xxx suffix for use by sites with pornographic content.

This strikes me as a very positive step. In no other area of our lives do we allow hardcore sexual content to be mixed in with the rest of what we see and do. I wouldn't take my children into Waterstones if I thought that Harry Potter would be sat side by side with adult literature. Indeed, I would be far happier with my children having unfettered access to the web if I knew there was a way by which I could simply block all unsuitable content.

More than ten years ago, a friend of mine was thinking of developing a trailer for windsurfing equipment and asked me to see if there was anything equivalent already on the Internet. I naively used AltaVista (ancient but rather good search engine) to search on 'water sports' with results that took me by surprise. More seriously, a friend recently complained to me that his daughter's biology homework had been to use the Internet to research bodily fluids, one of which was 'sperm'. This, at best, was a naive teacher.

Moving all pornographic content to .xxx domains would avoid this kind of accidental contact and also make it easier for the search engines to classify the data they pick up off the web.

There's no denying that the frontier spirit of the Internet has been and remains a great asset in its development. However, this romantic notion of a new wild west should be tempered by these oil barons of cyberspace whose intentions are not to do with creating a brave new world but instead revolve around exploitation and  profit.

It is for all the above reasons that I welcome the new .xxx domain and I would support any and all efforts to oblige sites with adult content to move to using them. After all, for anyone who wants to access that content, nothing changes except a few letters in a URL. The advantages though, to those who don't want pornography and especially those who should be protected from it, are immense.