Josh Bourne ⬥ 22 March
The day no one has been waiting for has finally arrived: last Friday, during the last day of the public meeting in San Francisco, the ICANN Board voted to approve the .XXX TLD with a vote of nine in favor to three against, with four members abstaining due to conflicts of interest.
Some, including religious and conservative groups, have called .XXX the “red light district” of the Internet and claimed it will lead to more adult content online. Others, including the adult entertainment industry, have rejected the TLD as a way for governments and regulators to censor content. It was the first time – at least in my memory, but probably ever – that priests and porn stars lined up on the same side of an issue.
I mean that as more than just a witty punch line. Practically no one was in favor of approving the .XXX TLD – least of all the adult entertainment industry, who the TLD is supposed to represent. The Free Speech Coalition, the non-profit organization affiliat
ed with the adult industry, actually protested outside of the ICANN meeting on Thursday.
The only group that was really pushing for this TLD was the group that applied for it: the ICM Registry. And no wonder; the ICM homepage displays a ticker boasting how many domains have been pre-reserved. At the time of writing this post, it was over 300,000. I’d be willing to bet that once .XXX opens up, the majority of registrations will not be from adult content producers looking to migrate over to .XXX, but from businesses trying to protect their brands from potentially damaging infringements in a taboo vertical, and speculators attempting to profit off the adult industry.
This begs the question, who is ICANN really serving? Clearly the decision to approve .XXX was not made on behalf of the public interest, but rather on behalf of the domain name industry, which stands to make a sizable amount of money off brand owners scrambling to protect their images and domain speculators grabbing everything and anything they can think of that relates to adult entertainment.
Tags: .XXX, adult entertainment industry, brands, conservative groups, domain name industry, Free Speech Coalition, ICANN, ICM Registry, Internet, non-profit organization, public interest, red light district, religious groups, San Francisco, speculators, TLDs