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I probably shouldn’t post in this thread because I’m not a member of the FSC and I’m a foreigner (eeek!). But what happens in US politics does affect my business so I’m an interested party and I’m glad that this thread is encouraging action.
We’re currently discussing who should be the official representative of the online world. A few questions and thoughts on this:
Is this person there to bring the FSC up to speed on what the online world wants or are they there to represent us to “the enemy” (govt, media et. al)?
If it’s the former, it doesn’t necessarily have to be one person. Perhaps a committee could be formed for the job.
Whoever does end up as “the representative/s” needs to be someone who can devote a lot of time and effort to the job. They need to be committed to the process. They will also need to deal with a public profile. Most of us are busy making money and leading our own anonymous lives. While many of the public figures suggested sound great, perhaps they will be too busy or not interested in becoming involved in “politics”. So I guess that’s why people turned to Connor Young because he’s stepped up to the plate and is willing to put in the time and effort. Perhaps if it was a paying job (is it?) more people would be willing to put their hand up.
Public figures can be very useful. Those mentioned could perhaps be asked to fulfill an “associate” kind of role. Maybe we can get them to write statements that can be posted with our “official statement”, or we can ask them to write or speak about what we’re doing.
As has been shown in this thread, the “online community” is made up of many different elements – paysite owners, models, photographers, linklist owners etc. Both the independent community and big business needs to be represented. These people will all have their own issues. Our representative/s needs to be made aware of these issues. I guess a message board will be useful for that. But people need to think about and communicate exactly what those issues are.
To paraphrase The Life of Brian, what are our demands? Well, what is it we want to tell the government?
Off the top of my head:
We want:
· To be able to continue conducting our legitimate business without harassment or censorship from the government
· To exercise our right to free speech
In return our responsibilities should be:
· To assist in preventing children from viewing unacceptable material
· To pay taxes
· To engage in ethical business practices e.g. fair treatment of employees etc
And we also want to tell the government that:
· We, as responsible webmasters, are making an effort and doing the right thing: not spamming, not engaged in CP, not scamming, not exploiting, making sure models are over 18 etc etc
· The American people want their porn (and show statistics to prove how many average, ordinary, churchgoing people view it).
It’s a start.
We’ve talked about labeling. From what’s been already discussed, the action involved in getting this up and running is:
1. Decide whether we want to stick with ICRA or create a new label, either a universal simple label or a slightly more detailed one.
2. Decide on the syntax of the label
3. Lobby the browsers and search engines to recognize it
4. Encourage webmasters to use it, perhaps through new linklist rules
5. Publicize our efforts (very important)
The question is, how do we decide on those first two things? Who decides? And when? How do we move beyond arguing about it and reach a consensus?
OK, this was a rambling attempt from me to try and sum up what’s happening so far. Not sure if it’s helpful or not.
One request to the FSC from me. When you finally get your online payment system happening, would you consider offering an “associate membership” for non US citizens? Or perhaps accept one-off donations?
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