Stephen Ryan is a danger to public morality. Apparently.

You wouldn’t think so upon meeting him. In person he is well spoken and pleasant. Ryan, an IT worker by day and a webmaster by night, has fallen foul of the IE Domain Registry (IEDR) for trying to register porn.ie as a site.
Ryan runs sex.ie, a blog and casual encounters site and was hoping to expand with porn.ie. He has teamed up with a photographer to produce soft-core original content for the site. “I want it to be quite arty. We want to produce naked photographs of girls – and guys. It’ll be porn, but nothing hard-core, just lots of flesh.”
At the moment Ryan’s plans are on indefinite hold because the IEDR has banned the use of the word ‘porn’ as a domain name. According to the body’s naming policy, website addresses “must not be offensive or contrary to public policy or generally accepted principles of morality.” In order to get around this Ryan tried to register ‘porn’ as a business name, but – surprise, surprise – the Companies Registration Office refused.
What annoys Ryan is that the IEDR has blocked his application because of the name, not because of any content the site may have contained. As he points out, “I could have registered a name such as ‘wine.ie’ and included adult pictures on the site. They’re not saying porn is immoral, but that the word is. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Ryan is not taking the IEDR’s ruling lying down. He plans to register a company called ‘Pornography’. He is hoping that by using the full word, one that is found in any standard dictionary, he’ll be able to get around the ruling.
An objection to the word does seem to be at the centre of the issue. It’s worth noting that neither the IEDR nor the Companies Registration Office is trying to ban adult material itself. When I contacted the IEDR, Conor McGuire, the Registration Services Manager, confirmed this. According to McGuire, the IEDR’s policies “do not encompass the content that appear on .ie websites, the policies simply relate to the domain name itself.” The IEDR will only suspend or delete domains if they receive a court order to the effect that illegal content appears on them.
No one can blame the IEDR for wishing to reserve the right to refuse domain names. Although words are just words, certain names and phrases are generally regarded as offensive, particularly those that are used to incite hatred toward a particular group.
This is where the IEDR’s reasoning gets into trouble. There is no denying that many people object to pornography, but both those who enjoy adult material and those who are against it, use the term ‘porn’ to describe it. Certain words are banned from use in the print media, or require that asterisks are used instead of letters, but ‘porn’ isn’t one of them.
There are those that would argue that pornography by its very nature constitutes ‘hate speak’ against women. This seems to be the view held by Official Ireland. Towards the end of October, the Limerick Rape Crisis Centre with the support of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform and the Health Service Executive held a conference entitled ‘Pornography: A Violence Against Women’, and as is obvious from the title, this was not a conference debating the issue, with voices from both sides of the fence. No pro-porn speakers took part.
This view of pornography is based on the premise that all pornography is produced and consumed by men and that the women involved have been exploited. The reality is a little more complicated, and this black-and-white position fails to take into account that the bulk of porn is made by well-paid professionals or enthusiastic amateurs, that pornography made by women, for women, is a growing trend and that women use porn too. Even the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, an American Christian group that opposes porn, has noted that 34% of church-going women have intentionally visited adult websites.
Whatever your feelings about pornography, most people would agree that removing it from the Internet is an impossible task. Porn is the number one topic searched for and about a quarter of all web searches are for sexually explicit material.
Since this is the case, domain names such as porn.ie – a name that does exactly what it says on the tin – should be encouraged. This would make it much easier for parents using filters to block these sites from children. Forcing those who host adult sites to choose innocuous-sounding names only makes it more likely that under-18s will be exposed to pornographic material by accident. But since that IEDR has blocked several attempts to register ‘porn.ie’, it’s unlikely that a more sensible view will prevail. For the meantime, porn will remain a four-letter word.