WASHINGTON, March 16, 2006 (AFP) - Two US senators proposed legislation that would establish a new ".XXX" domain for racy or sexually explicit websites.

The bill proposed by senators Mark Pryor and Max Baucus, both Democrats, calls upon the US Department of Commerce to exclude sexually charged content from established website domain names such as .gov, .com, .org, .net, and .edu.

Baucus said at a press conference that the .XXX domain would help parents use filtering software to keep children from accessing pornographic sites, and would help prevent hapless Internet users from inadvertently stumbling onto sexually-explicit websites that they would prefer not to see.

"While the Internet is an exceptional learning tool, it allows children the same easy access to websites about space shuttles as it does for pornography," said Baucus, adding that violators would be subject to a hefty fine.

"This bill will section off a piece of the Internet neighborhood and confine adult sites to one location," the Montana senator said.

What worries me about this initiative is this: Who gets to be in charge of determining what is, and is not, a .xxx website? Is a site with curse words going to be forced to use the .xxx domain? Will National Geographic, with its pictures of topless tribal women, be shoved off onto a .xxx domain?

This site, for example, sometimes features pictures of scantily-clad babes and occasional obscenities. At times I've even posted some rather gruesome footage from the war on terror. Does it take much imagination stretching to picture some holy-than-thou bureaucrat deciding that Say Anything should be tagged with a .xxx domain?

If that happened I'd loose a lot of readership. People reading at work or through their university's network would probably find themselves no longer able to get here, and many readers might shun this place even at home out of a hesitance to visit any site tagged .xxx lest the URL in their browser's history file leader to embarrassment when their friends or family see it.

Maybe none of that will happen. Maybe I'm being paranoid. Still, by giving the government this power to regulate content on the internet we are taking a big risk. I'd rather see that power of regulation remain with the individual internet users.

Simply put, I think the .xxx domain is a slippery slope. It is a road we just shouldn't go down lest we find ourselves facing some unsavory changes in the way the internet works.