2006年NPR美国国家公共电台五月-No Web 'Red Light' District

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Madeleine Brand: Back now with Day To Day. There will be no formal "red light" district on the Internet. The group that oversees¹ how Internet addresses are assigned has rejected giving porn websites a .xxx suffix². An unlikely coalition³ of some adult websites and religious groups rejected the idea. Bob Moon joins us from the Marketplace news bureau in New York. And Bob, this is indeed an unlikely coalition, why did these groups oppose the idea?

Bob Moon: Well, er, for, for very different reasons, as you might suspect, Madeleine. The company that first proposed this idea wanted to promote it as a way to shield kids from on-line pornography. It claimed that having this adult content in a designated area would make it easier to filter it out for those that didn't want it. That's the reason many of the adult websites were opposed to this idea. They claimed that it came down to a free speech issue that they shouldn't be shunned⁴ off to an area that could end up being cut off from their perspective customers. Conservatives and Christian⁵ groups, on the other hand, they weren't happy about the legitimacy⁶ that they said this formal designation would give to pornography, and because there would be no requirement for the adult websites to migrate over to this new area on the web, this new domain⁷, if you will, the anti-pornography group said this would just have ended up adding to more of what's already out there. And it would have just handed these sites an easy promotional boost.

Madeleine Brand: And, and did the managers of the Internet domains⁸ agree with, with those ideas?

Bob Moon: Well, this oversight⁹ group is called ICANN, that's short for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, their final vote on this was 9 against and 5 in favor. The group issued a statement, saying that it's gonna be giving more details on their decision later this week. There's already some controversy¹⁰, though, over whether this decision was influenced by the US government, particularly the Commerce Department, and whether the US is wielding¹¹ too much influence over managing the Internet, of course the Internet was created in this country. But now it's estimated that there is, there is more than 2 trillion dollars in global commerce on the Internet, and there has been growing discontent outside this country that America has too much control beyond the technical operation of the web. Back to Wall Street Journal reported there was an internal memo¹² prepared by the Commerce Department that said this proposal for the adult content area wouldn't happen if the US, and I quote here, "does not wish for that to happen, no matter what the international community, ah, might decide".

Madeleine Brand: And any chance this proposal could make it comeback?

Bob Moon: Well, Internet experts say this idea does appear to be dead right now, although the porn industry has suggested that there is a better way of keeping children away from these sites. They say, create a kids-friendly zone, so parents could filter out the content that way. And today in the Marketplace newsroom we are looking further into reports the government is collecting the phone records of millions of Americans.

Madeleine Brand: Thank you, Bob. Bob Moon of public radio's daily business show, Marketplace.

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Words in NPR
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shun: to deliberately avoid someone or something; 避开, 避免
in favor: support, approval, or agreement for something such as a plan, idea, or system; 赞同