For the past ten years, there have been many discussions about setting up an adult-material top-level XXX domain for the Internet. At first, the thought was to institute XXX as a gTLD or generic top-level domain, open to anyone willing to pay for such a domain name. But, last March, a voluntary dot-triple-X domain was instead proposed and approved by the ICANN Board as a sponsored TLD, a subset of gTLDs where a sponsor can enforce rules pertaining to name acquisition.
ICM Registry LLC began operations last spring for the new XXX domain by setting up three phases of name acquisition:
- Sunrise allows acquisition of specific names by those who already own trademark and brand names and who wish to move them into the new XXX domain -- that period ended November 1, 2011.
- Landrush, which began November 8th and is due to end November 25th, collects requests for other names to added to the XXX domain -- if only one request is received for a name, that requestor may purchase the name; if there is more than one request for a name, a auction will be conducted at the end of November involving all the requestors for that name.
- General Availability of XXX domain names will begin December 6th, in the same way that other domain names are available to the public.
The reasoning behind the creation of the XXX TLD is that parents, schools, workplaces and search engines will be better able to block adult content by disallowing any traffic from an XXX domain, as opposed to the current method of content-based filtering. However, owners of adult-entertainment websites in the COM domain do not want to give up their established domain-presence. Owners of pornographic websites also do not want their identity purchased by pornography opponents and placed unused in the XXX domain, a tactic called "defensive registration" by both sides.
It's no surprise that a coalition of adult-entertainment website operators filed a lawsuit in California last week suing ICANN and ICM Registry. The lawsuit is based on economic arguments of price gouging, unfair pricing and harmful anti-competitive practices. The lawsuit claims that ICM intimidated ICANN into approving the XXX gTLD and promised millions of dollars in income to ICANN. The filers of this lawsuit are asking that the entire TLD process for the XXX domain name be stopped and then be re-opened to set up more reasonable pricing and fairer competition.
The response of ICM Registry is that the lawsuit is without merit. A possible judicial intervention into the TLD process may set a precedent that will affect web hosting for years.
Commented by: web design services, 28 December, 2011
In my opinion it is very important and good decision of ICANN Board because in this way you can easily separate adult and non-adult content and material. Its process is very keen and comprehensive as i have read in your post, overall this is very effective and good decision for the long-term internet policy.