.XXX Resurfaces

Today brought the news that .XXX is very much still alive and kicking after it was first defeated by the ICANN board way back in May last year now – it’s now even being covered by BBC News and Forbes (the latter of which are reporting on it as if it is something new). Public comments on the TLD as a concept are currently being requested by ICANN once more and this period is open until February 5th. ICM has tried to appease various technical issues brought up by ICANN members, but the overriding thing that ICM cannot demonstrate is that the adult online internet community wants .XXX. You may be wondering why this is such a bad idea right now, with a gold rush for adult domains ahead of the industry, below are some of the issues.

The main problems with .XXX

• ICM wants to charge $75/year for a .XXX domain, for relatively little extra value
• By having a domain on .xxx, you must follow ICM’s (not ICANN’s) ‘Best business practices’ or else lose your .XXX
• There are bills in congress to make .XXX mandatory, meaning american run adult sites would not be allowed on .com/.net etc.
• It is listed as being one of the ways to protect children from adult material on the net, despite having no regulations on Warning Pages or Age Verification systems, which means it would rely on third parties to block it as a whole
• Their policy includes the right to ‘Reserve geographic and religiously/culturally sensitive names’, how far could this be expanded? – would someone really end up paying $75 per year for sex.xxx?
• There are now hundreds of thousands of adult websites across the .tld spectrum, ranging from .com, to .co.uk to .jp – not all of these will switch, with international webmasters not bound by US rulings – this could create an unfair marketplace for US businesses
• There are already a number of self regulation methods in place for adult webmasters, including the ICRA.org rating system and the newly announced ASACP self-labelling tag (the RTA label).

As the Fight the Dot XXX website, ran by FightThePatent (the same guy lead a one man campaign against Acacia when they tried patenting concepts related to streaming and downloading movies online), states – a .KIDS concept (a whitelisting .tld for domains safe for browsing for kids) has as much potential as the .xxx domain idea, however the response from IFFOR (a subsiduary of ICM) was there was not enough companies interested in purchasing the .KIDS domain to make it viable, despite the same principles in IFFOR for the approval and monitoring process of .XXX domains are easily extended to .KIDS. Fight the Dot XXX sees this as one of the main pieces of evidence for the .xxx extension only being created for profit, rather than safety or industry regulation.

Granted, If a domain is in the .xxx TLD, then could it be protected from obscenity prosecutions (such as those ran against Hustler, Playboy, Extreme Associates etc) – but surely this can also be reversed and can be seen as an easy way for the Government or other organisations to completely block .xxx at the ISP level if they feel necessary. It is felt across the adult industry that an almost universal move by products such as Norton would be to block the .xxx to protect people’s home PCs from viruses and other malware due to the bad reputation that adult sites have for installing dialers/spyware/adware etc. This would only mean that reputable sites are blocked alongside those which originally caused problems are were already on blacklists of filtering software.

Another factor that hasn’t been considered is the effect on other domain extensions, with so many adult sites that ‘need’ to be regulated and confined to the .xxx TLD – surely the markets of .com, .net, .org and .co.uk (among others) would suffer to the tune of tens of millions if this idea was fully implemented and adult webmasters were forced to put their sites onto the new extension. Despite this there has been silence from anyone representing them, and ICANN have not raised this topic (which may be in part due to the fact that ICM propose to pay them $1 per domain registered – at a minimum of $90,000 per annum if .xxx is approved).

Just some of those who have publically stated that they are against the introduction of .xxx include:

• Free Speech Coalition – The largest adult industry trade association
• AskJolene – Popular adult search engine
• AEBN – Leading video-on-demand providers, owners of ‘Pornotube.com’
• Adam & Eve – One of the largest video and toy distributors
• Lightspeed Media – Company behind Tawnee Stone, Jordan Capri and many other hugely successful solo girl websites
• Karups (KarupsPC.com) – One of the largest adult sites on the net in terms of both traffic and reputation
• Sex.com – One of the most valuable and typed adult domains on the internet
• The SCORE Group – One of the most popular strip club brands in North America, owners of ‘ScoreCash.com’
• SplitInfinity Networks – Webhost
• J. D. Obenberger and Associates & Eric M. Bernstein – Leading attorneys in the adult industry
• National A-1 Internet – ISP

To send your views on the topic to ICANN, use the following Email address: xxx-icm-agreement[AT]icann.org. For those that send in emails, there is a confirmation email that is sent back to you. The subject is: ConfirmSystem: xxx-icm-agreement@icann.org (followed by an ID #) and it comes from confirmsystem@icann.org. You can read other views sent in by the public by visiting the ICANN forums by clicking here.