Woman files suit seeking to register 'dirty words' as Internet addresses

The Associated Press

05.07.99

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CONCORD, N.H. — A New Hampshire woman is going to court to register as Internet addresses the "seven dirty words" made famous by comedian George Carlin.

She is suing the Herndon, Va., company that registers World Wide Web domains because it insists that if a word is too dirty for radio, television or a newspaper it also is too dirty for an Internet address.

The debate has grown more heated as the WWW addresses have grown more valuable, changing hands for much money with titillating domain names considered particularly desirable.

The site www.sex.com, for example, reportedly creates $100 million a year in advertising, subscriptions and other revenue.

The federal lawsuit by Lynn Haberstroh of Raymond seeks to force Network Solutions Inc., a private company that registers the most popular Web names under contract from the government, to register names based on Carlin's dirty words.

"We don't think there are any factual issues here. There's a well-defined First Amendment right that is being violated," Jonathan Springer of Portsmouth, Haberstroh's lawyer, told The Telegraph.

A California company called Seven Words has filed a similar lawsuit in that state, while Wired News says the American Civil Liberties Union is considering joining the suit.

NSI, however, says it merely is following long-established policy on public communication.

Carlin's seven words describe body parts, functions and sexual acts. They are banned from the airwaves by the Federal Communications Commission as part of court-upheld restrictions on obscenity.

The public affairs office of the FCC says that despite Carlin's comedy routine, there has not been an actual list of banned words at the agency for more than 30 years.

The words effectively are kept off the air by laws forbidding vulgar speech that date at least to the Radio Act of 1927 and which were upheld in a $1.7 million FCC fine against radio personality Howard Stern in 1995.

The question of whether dirty domains should be allowed is not new. One Web site includes discussions involving legendary Internet figure Jon Postel, who oversaw the domain name structure until his death last year.

The site says Postel wouldn't allow use of the words out of fear they would attract government regulation.

The sole exception to the ban involves the four-letter vulgarity for excrement. NSI allows that word because it shows up in the phonetic English spelling of Japanese words used in domain names, including www.shitake.com.

Haberstroh's lawsuit argues that NSI is being arbitrary in that exception and in other instances.

For example, it notes that while NSI refuses to register the four-letter verb for the sex act, it has registered the seven-letter gerund of the same verb.

Complaints that NSI is a monopoly have led the federal government to allow five other companies to register certain sites, but technical questions and disagreement from other countries have left the issue far from settled.

NSI has asked to move the suit to the eastern jurisdiction of Virginia, where the company is based.