Peter Griffin: Cyberspace gets a red light district

In the late 90s there was big money in dotcoms. It didn't matter what these companies did, the .com website addresses attached to them were gold, a valuable signpost in cyberspace.

The simpler the .com, the more likely people were to visit it. Corporations paid huge sums to secure web addresses and sued cyber-squatters who were sitting on their website names looking to be bought off.

Now you can register a domain for next to nothing and we've seen the emergence of a whole new level of domains including .info and .biz and, locally, .maori.nz.

Add to that .xxx from the end of the year, with internet governing body the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers approval of a web suffix for adults-only websites.

Porn sites will soon stand out in cyberspace like the neon signs that hover above the doors of their bricks and mortar equivalents.

An estimated four per cent of web traffic is believed to be adult content. That's a lot of smutty pictures and videos floating around the internet.

It's easy enough to click on a search engine result and inadvertently end up at an adults-only website. But it will be harder to plead ignorance when the website address has .xxx as its suffix. In fact, companies will be able to set their software filters to prevent employees from reaching such sites.

For home users you can expect future internet security software suites from the likes of Symantec and Trend Micro to filter .xxx websites. But there are two things that make the formation of .xxx ineffectual and no more than a money gathering exercise for internet companies and a political play from those in Americas conservative administration.

First, the .xxx domain will be voluntary. Adult websites will probably register their existing .com website as a .xxx site but still maintain their .com. Second, each website address has a numeric internet protocol (IP) address attached to it which acts as a type of electronic post code. If you know the IP address, you can reach the site without entering .xxx.

There's been a cautious reaction from an adult entertainment industry fearful of being ring-fenced in an internet ghetto of porn. Adult website owners are happy for .xxx to exist, but only if its use is voluntary. It will cost US$60 to register a .xxx domain name, 500,000 of which will be made available.