.XXX and conservative groups
12 May 2006 | Published in ICANN | 1 Comment
By now, you should have read elsewhere that the ICANN board has rejected the ICM application to create a .XXX TLD.
It still comes as a surprise to some. Frankly, this was the prognosis I made to Stuart Lawley two years ago, for the very reasons mentioned by the European Commission. I mentioned in a previous blog entry that 6000 complaints from US citizens would have more weight on the conservative US administration than any other consideration. Had the ICANN board approved .XXX, I bet that it would have been blocked by the DoC at a later stage, ie in the IANA-DoC-Verisign root zone update process.
This is clearly a political decision by ICANN. Rather than restrict itself to its role of keeping the security and stability of the domain name system, ICANN went on to examine irrelevant criteria, like how the porn industry supported the initiative. It would have been ICM’s right to try and sell .XXX TLDs with or without a potential market. It is not up to ICANN to decide if a business plan makes sense or not. The only thing ICANN should care about is that the registry should be able to run the TLD from a technical point of view until the end of the contract. Whether it is successful or not is not ICANN’s business.
Again, I am not convinced that .XXX would have allowed to corral the porn sites in a specific domain and might have helped in any way to prevent anyone from viewing porn. The filters set up by the governments of China or Saudi Arabia are much more efficient. On a side note, they are also more efficient than labelling initiatives like ICRA. This web site has been labelled with ICRA, but after one year, I have yet to see any visiting browser actually using that label.
Update: This article is also featured on CircleID.
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9 January 2007 at 3:54 (#)
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