Tonga has a new reputation as a leader in world web pornography, this week being ranked as one of the top ten country suffixes for web porn publishing.

It's a status that Tongans view as ironic since their government late last year used the excuse that it wanted to set a high moral and Christian national code of conduct when it amended the Tongan Constitution to suppress the local print media.

The release this week of the first global study on web porn publishing in 100 countries claimed Tonga's .to domain was hosting 846,800 pages of porn (10th place on the list of worst offenders), but outranked by Niue's .nu which the report claimed hosts nearly 3 million pages of porn (4th place).

The report made by the Secure Computing Corporation was the first study of the global distribution of pornographic web pages by the top 100 individual country domains. The study examined pornographic web pages in non-US country suffixes and found over 46 million pages of pornography in the top 100 individual country suffixes. These were overwhelmingly concentrated in two regions Europe and the Pacific. Germany topped the list with over 10 million pages of porn, the UK was second with over 8.5 million pages and Australia third with over 5.6 million pages.

The study found that the domain suffixes of a number of small islands in the Pacific host a large number of pornographic web pages. Apart from Niue, other island domains each hosting hundreds of thousands of pages of pornography are the suffixes of Tonga, Christmas Island, the Cocos Islands, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

However, its findings are being challenged by J. William Semich, the President of .NU Domain Ltd. who says the Secure Computing report is false because it has included thousands of inactive and expired domain names, and the millions of web pages associated with them. Semich said .nu had revoked or removed about 6,000 names for violating its policies or US laws.

Distracted

In Tonga, the Secretary of Tonga's Department of Communication, Paula Ma'u, said that the finding by Secure Computing Corporation of USA, came as no surprise to him at all, "because the allocation of a Domain name is a bit like the allocation of Orbital Slots, it is first come first served." He said that the other problem that is facing government is that the technology is well ahead of capability of government to regulate and administer these new technologies.

Paula said that the establishment of his department in 2001 was the first major move by government to introduce legislation and to establish a reputed regime for its communication assets, such as orbital slots and internet domain name. "But the Newspaper Licensing Act came along and distracted us from the IT work that we were doing."

With regards to the thousands of pornographic pages on the .to domain, Paula said that recently his department had established a closer working relationship with Tonic, the company that has been administering the .to domain for the Tongan government ever since it was created more than 10 years ago.

Paula said that his department is drafting a legislation to try and have some control on who should be given the domain name .to.

The Crown Prince Tupouto'a is known to be a major shareholder in Tonic.