ICANN Decides to Trash .xxx Domain

With the most unlikely of political partnerships aligned in opposition to it, the ".xxx" Internet domain name for the adult entertainment industry has been rejected. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, reversed the decision it made last June to create the domain.

Conservative policy groups in the United States opposed .xxx on the grounds it would legitimize pornography. Web operators, for their part, were against such a registry because it would make their operations more visible to government and to filters.

The immediate losers, it appears, are the registries that will not earn the additional fees a new domain name would bring, as well as the cyber squatters who have been snapping up every variant of sex.xxx imaginable.

Still, there is a nagging question -- voiced in particular by the European community -- as to whether this move suggests the Internet is falling captive to censorship forces in the United States with nothing less than freedom of speech at stake.

A Freedom of Speech Issue?

"It is unfortunate that there has been some form of censorship established by eliminating the .xxx domain," P. Kevin Kilroy, chairman of the board for Dotster, told MacNewsWorld. As a parent, he added, he does seek out ways to control the content on his home computers.

"Is this some form of government or quasi government censorship? I wouldn't elect to opine," Kilroy said, "but I would say there are certain issues regarding the World Wide Web we need to think through."

Indeed, freedom of speech and privacy is becoming a larger topic of concern in the Internet community. The opposition to a .xxx domain name, though, appears to be for largely banal or even illogical reasons.

Strictly speaking, for instance, the porn industry is already a legal, or legitimate, industry. A .xxx domain name would have hardly made it respectable.

Unfavorable Labels

Most people in the adult entertainment industry do not want the stigma of being labeled "porn" -- they just want some of the money the industry rakes in, Peter Vogel, partner with the Dallas office of Gardere Wynne Sewell, told MacNewsWorld.

"People who use these sites can hide their activities from others," he pointed out. "This also means this industry is underground and unregulated."

A .xxx domain could have helped define the limits on who is providing adult content, leading to more tax revenue for governments, Vogel noted. "Also, it may [have permitted] better control over community standards."

Supporters of .xxx, however, made erroneous assumptions as well. One argument offered in its favor was that having porn registered under .xxx would make it easier to filter out and possibly regulate. That argument was quickly debunked, as there was no corresponding request for porn operators to dismantle their .com or .biz Web sites already in operation.

"The governments of the United States and many in the European Union argue that adult-content sites would sign up for the '.xxx' domain, but would also keep their current '.com' and '.net' addresses, since there is no obligation to drop the other domains," William Munck, partner at the Dallas law firm of Munck Butrus P.C., told MacNewsWorld.

"Common sense dictates that without an obligation to drop their current URLs in adopting '.xxx' domain names, the end result of the '.xxx' domain could actually be an increase the amount of porn on the Internet," he remarked.

A Certain Cachet

The one argument that does resonate -- ironically, both for or against .xxx -- is that unlike the .org or .biz domain, .xxx would have been commercially viable.

"The power of a great domain name has huge commercial value," Kilroy said. "Sex.com has been resold several times. The last purchase price was for a phenomenal amount -- but would sex.xxx have the same cachet?"

Some in the industry say yes, it would have.

Matt Bentley, CSO of Sedo.com, a marketplace for buying and selling aftermarket domain names, told MacNewsWorld that the market was convinced that the new extension would have been a success.

"We've heard from domain investors who've indicated that they would pay anywhere from 50 to 150 percent of the .com value to acquire the .xxx. Typically non-com extensions like .net are only worth about 5 to 15 percent of the value of the .com."

In short, he said, the biggest challenge for any new extension is market awareness. "If awareness of the extension doesn't reach a critical mass of users, companies and webmasters won't be willing to take a risk developing their Web site on it. If there's no Web site, users don't become aware of it."

It is a Catch 22 that has bedeviled all extensions -- except, of course, .com.

"Among the many contenders," Bentley said, ".xxx probably had among the best chances of succeeding."