Online .xxx

The Internet has become the backbone of our personal lives, business, industry and much of government. And by providing access to a wealth of information, most everyone who has Internet access uses it to get information as mundane as the spelling of a word or as exotic as learning the Hebrew translation of an English phrase.

But one of the biggest uses of the Internet is pornography, usually referred to politely as "the adult industry." Call it what you want, it's estimated to be a $12 billion-a-year enterprise that exists, as experts have observed, because there is a demand for it.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names, which oversees the domain names used by Web sites, is proposing to add another domain to the familiar .com, . net and .gov, among others. The new domain, .xxx, would be for pornography. The ICAN hopes by having a separate domain for adult sites it would be able to better police those sites, which are noted for credit-card fraud.

While any effort to control pornography on the Web deserves to be applauded, the ICAN proposal is unlikely to control the online porn industry, which already has more than 300 million sites, most of them controlled by just 20 companies.

Like so many things that are bad for us, the porn industry will wither only when the demand goes away. Unfortunately, the rawest pornography -- which already has an solid foothold in the magazine and cable-TV industries -- will continue to take billions of dollars from willing Internet participants.