Two Pacific island countries have become the global centre of the Internet porn industry, according to a report.
The report, by United States-based consultants Secure Computing, said Niue and Tonga provide addresses for almost as many pornographic web pages as the whole of Asia and Latin America. It alleges that Niue hosts 2,9-million pornographic pages, while The Netherlands has only 1,9-million.
The allegations have caused an uproar, with one company threatening legal action against the authors and anxious debate among the countries’ populations. Most of the modern Pacific is deeply religious and bans the import and ownership of pornography.
The domain names of Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu are also alleged to have hundreds of thousands of pornographic pages, as are the Australian territories of Christmas Island and Cocos Island. The Pacific came second only to Europe as an address for pornographic web pages although it excluded sites hosted in the US.
Domain names — the two-letter country codes at the end of website addresses — have become a significant source of revenue for Pacific island countries since the mid-1990s. Companies do not need to be registered in a country to use its domain.
In some countries such income has made a measurable difference. Niue, a coral island of 1 600 people whose main income is aid from New Zealand, last year became the first country in the world to have free, nationwide Internet access thanks to sales of the .nu domain. Tuvalu has built roads, hospitals and schools with the $40-million proceeds from leasing the rights to its .tv domain to a Silicon Valley company for 10 years.
NU Domain, the US-based company that manages Niue’s domain registry, is planning to launch defamation proceedings against the authors of the report.
”There are no such pornographic web pages being hosted in Niue or by the .nu top-level domain, nor were there ever any such web pages,” said the company’s founder and president, Bill Semich. — Â