Porn sites to have new domain “.xxx”
ICANN board approves dot-XXX top-level domain for porn
Pornography will have its own top-level domain, dot XXX, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers decided Friday, 25th June 2010.
The proposal was made under ICANN’s rules for ‘sponsored’ TLDs, through which domains have been created by interest groups.
ICM Registry, the company that proposed the dot-XXX domain, welcomed the vote. “The decision should soon bring to fruition our six-year effort to create a specific Web address for online adult entertainment, and comes on the heels of an independent review that declared that ICANN’s previous decision to deny dot-xxx was wrong,” he said.
ICM Registry says it is a “completely independent entity with no affiliation, current or historic, with the adult entertainment industry.”
Dot-XXX domains won’t start appearing right away.
ICANN must first conduct a “due diligence” study of ICM’s business plan for the domain, and then the board will review the contract proposed for the operation of the domain. That may involve referring the matter to ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee, which is next scheduled to meet in December in Colombia, said board member Bruce Tonkin.
ICANN has considered introducing a top-level domain reserved for adult-oriented websites before. It failed to reach a decision on the current proposal at a meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, in March, and rejected similar proposals in May 2006 and March 2007. Dot-XXX and another supported by ICM, dot-kids, were among a long list of TLDs rejected by ICANN in 2000.
Friday’s vote was not unanimously in favor of creating the dot-XXX domain: ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom and fellow board member Jean-Jacques Subrenat both abstained. In a statement after the vote, Beckstrom explained his abstention, expressing doubts about the advice the board had been given on the project.
“While I accept the contribution to ICANN’s accountability and transparency provided by the existence and the use of the independent panel review process, I am nonetheless concerned about the determination by two of the three panelists that the ICANN board should not use business judgment in the conduct of its affairs. In my view as CEO, the board must be able to use business judgment in order to protect the global public interest in the coordination of the root of the Internet and the domain name system,” he said.
Source: P. Sayer, Reuters, 25 June 2010: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS260363452120100625
