POCOLA, OK -- Police here have raided Adult World and accused owners of violating state obscenity laws. However, no arrests were actually made. The officers said their only goal was to confiscate the pornography and shut the store’s doors. An investigation leading to the raid took several months, during which time the officers reached the conclusion that the store was selling illegal videos and magazines. After the raid, officers from several agencies took inventory and seized items, which they said would be destroyed. The cops were still going through items to be destroyed several hours after the raid. Perhaps it was difficult to decide which officers would take which DVDs home for destruction.

Factual information from Channel 40 News, 5/8/06

FILTERS BLOCK WEBSITES UNEVENLY

WEST PALM BEACH, FL -- When students or teachers in schools or libraries here try to log on to sites such as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation or Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, they are greeted with a notice that says the site is blocked. The reason: it falls within the gay/lesbian category.

However, students who want to check out organizations that oppose gay rights, such as the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality or the Traditional Values Coalition, encounter no problems.

Bob LaRocca, who monitors computer security for the school district, says part of the problem is the ages of students surfing the sites. He acknowledges the blocked sites may be fine for high school children but has concerns about younger students accessing them. That keeps them off limits for everyone.

"Someday, when we can differentiate who is going through the sites, things may change," he said. "But there is no technology out there to do that. When you have 200,000 users, how do you judge how old someone is? It's impossible, so we have to treat it so it's the youngest child."

The American Civil Liberties Union plans to review the policy.

Information and quotes from Christina DeNardo, Palm Beach Post, 5/9/06

DOT XXX GOES DOWN IN FLAMES, FSC CELEBRATES

MARINA DEL RAY, CA -- The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Board of Directors has voted (9 to 5) to reject the proposal by ICM Registry for a .XXX Sponsored Top Level Domain, a scheme which would have created a virtual red light district for adult entertainment. The vote represents a major victory for the adult Internet and for FSC, which has taken a strong position against the .XXX TLD almost since it was proposed. After study and analysis, FSC concluded that any such action, even if .XXX was initially intended to be voluntary, risked ghettoizing the adult Internet and burdening it with government mandated restrictions.

In March, FSC Communications Director Tom Hymes lobbied against the proposal at the ICANN meeting in Wellington, joined by Fiona Patten of the Australian EROS Association. In addition, FSC mounted a concerted campaign to rally adult Webmasters and adult entertainment companies to send letters to ICANN in opposition to .XXX. Many did send letters, including Larry Flynt of Hustler, Steve Orenstein of Wicked, Private Media and other major players, and the results clearly paid off as evidenced in comments by ICANN Chief Executive Paul Twomey. Twomey said that the Board took the adult sites’ concerns as a sign ICM did not fully represent the industry, a criterion currently required for such domains. Twomey said the decision largely came down to whether the creation of .XXX might put ICANN in a difficult position of having to enforce all of the world's laws governing adult entertainment, including ones that might require adult sites to use the domain.

The ICANN vote is a victory for free expression around the world, a victory which fittingly involved an international alliance in which representatives of American and Australian adult entertainment joined forces in expressing similar concerns to ICANN at the Wellington meeting. Without that coordinated effort, and without the letters sent from adult industry companies, ICANN could have perhaps assumed that objections to .XXX stemmed from the opinions of only one trade association.

In a bizarre twist, many social conservatives representing anti-adult entertainment factions in the U.S. also lobbied ICANN against the .XXX idea. The groups feared that adult Internet companies would keep their dot-com domain names as well as .XXX domain names, thereby expanding the availability of adult materials on the Internet.

Some information and quotes are from Anik Jesdanun, Associated Press, 5/10/06