If Fred H. Cate has his way, the safest places on the Internet may soon be pornography sites.
Mr. Cate, a professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, was recently appointed to the policy council of the International Foundation for Online Responsibility. The nonprofit organization is responsible for formulating policy to govern the .xxx domain name, a URL suffix for sex-related Web sites that makes its debut this month.
The council has the thorny task of crafting regulations for .xxx Web sites that balance the First Amendment and privacy rights of users with legal regulations keeping children away from—and out of—pornography, says Joan Irvine, executive director of Iffor, as the foundation is called. The policies it recommends will be the basis for regulations adopted by ICM Registry, the company that created the foundation and is managing the .xxx domain.
Mr. Cate, who is 48, says the council’s work is at the intersection of several of his academic interests. He is an expert on privacy and security who has also written a book about the legal issues around controlling minors’ access to sexually explicit Web sites. He says the Internet in general and sex-related entertainment in particular have long interested him as fields of study because of the constant need to develop laws and policies to keep up with the breakneck pace of technological advancement.
“For most advisory positions of this kind, I feel I am tremendously underqualified,” he says. “However, in this case, my whole career has focused on the kind of issues the Iffor council is involved with.”
But even Mr. Cate is stepping into uncharted territory. The policies he and the other eight members of the council develop will be designed to bring order to a particularly unruly corner of the Internet, where criminal activity has long been difficult to trace and even harder to prevent. To make matters more complicated, use of the .xxx domain is entirely voluntary, meaning that he and the rest of the policy council will have to help convince some purveyors that it is in their best interest to register .xxx Web sites.
He says, however, that there are compelling arguments for those businesses to adopt .xxx URL’s. For one, the foundation and ICM Registry will require companies to keep their sites free of malware and viruses and to install stringent protections to lock down sensitive user information, making consumers feel safer on the sites.
“What’s the thing that stops people from paying for adult content online now? The fear that they or their computer will be compromised,” he says.
Another benefit is that parents and employers who want to limit access to pornography can block the entire domain. And every registered .xxx Web site will be regularly scanned by software searching for child pornography, which will pass information on any potentially offending pages to the federal government’s child-safety hotline.
“Will it succeed? Who knows?” Mr. Cate says. “But it’s a really good example of how to deal with the demand for material, the constitutional issues, and the child-protection issues in a way that carves out accommodation for all three.”
Mr. Cate has extensive experience putting his scholarly expertise on privacy and technology to nonacademic use. He is director of the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research and a member of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board. He previously served on advisory boards for online security and privacy for the Department of Defense and the Federal Trade Commission.
The breadth of his experiences is what drew the foundation to him, Ms. Irvine says. Establishment of the .xxx domain is a longstanding point of contention in the Internet-governance world, opposed by both conservatives and some members of the “adult entertainment” industry, who say that its regulations have the potential to be unduly invasive.
ICM Registry had petitioned the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which approves domain names, for approval of .xxx since 2000. So the work of the policy council will be watched very closely. “We’ll be under a microscope,” says Iffor’s Ms. Irvine. “What the Iffor policy council does is going to be looked at as a potential model for future best practices in other industries.”
Mr. Cate is undaunted. The uncertainty of the domain’s future, he says, is part of what drew him to the project.
“One of the great things about being a professor is that you never know what the next phone call will bring,” he says. “There’s constantly a new class, a new law, or a new issue to address. It’s a job with a feeling of constant surprise.”
