After ten years of saying no and vocal opposition by everyone potentially affected from an .XXX top level domain – everyone except .XXX profiteers, that is – last Thursday ICANN officially approved .XXX.
Porn already owns the best .COM real estate it ever needs. Yet now .XXX’s pimp daddies at ICM Registry and its backers have free reign to scoop up all the domain squatting and defensive registrations they can handle.
No one is looking at an .XXX domain and thinking, “That’s where I’ll cash in.” They’re thinking, “I better buy my business name, my daughter’s name, and my own name… just in case.”
ICM claims it will only sell domains to those their own 5013c “management” arm IFFOR deems as “officially in the adult entertainment industry.” It is unclear how this is determined. Meanwhile, ICM has already pre-sold over a quarter million domains.
Internet porn giant Kink.com knows a protective business decision when it sees one: Kink felt strong-armed to pre-purchase their brand’s domains in the copycat .XXX realm to protect their brands, and have defensively purchased thousands of domains.
Sure, it’s porn’s money to spend as they please. And you don’t have to buy anything, either. But this speaks volumes to the false sense of endorsement that may have contributed to one of ICANN’s most confusing decisions to hand piles of money to a group of relentless entrepreneurs since the creation of .AERO.
ICM is bragging to have sold over a quarter million pre-registrations. At $75 a pop shot for reg, and 268,788 sold (as of this writing), that’s a current total of $20,159,100 in pre-sales.
ICM’s Stuart Lawley bragged to Bloomberg that ICM is set to make at least $200 million a year, and he predicts to snag between 3 and 5 million registrations.
Do you think anyone else is thinking that inventing a TLD compelling people to register primarily out of defense would be a really profitable business model?
If so, you’re in luck. ICANN is about to make it easy to do exactly that: the generic TLD process is set to be finalized by this June.
It’s Not Because We Need More Porn
Lest you forget: I am a pro-porn female. I’m all for more porn. But: with great porn comes great responsibility.
My ZDNet colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols remarked Oh My God! Porn is Officially On The Internet! - and he was wisely pointing out the single most collective WTF most of us have with .XXX: it seems redundant.
He hit the turgid nail on the head while explaining that yes, Virginia, not only is there already lots of XXX online if you look for it – but remarkably, even those who you’d think would stand to gain from creating more adult real estate strongly opposed .XXX.
ICM nee .XXX still claim to have support from adult industry people – somewhere – yet every porn group on the planet spoke out against it.
ICM nee .XXX still claim to have the endorsement of family groups – somewhere – yet family and religious groups came out in droves to oppose .XXX.
On top of all this, .XXX was opposed by groups not nearly as fringey as religious conservatives and porn peeps: even the ACLU begged ICANN to see .XXX as a very bad idea from a human rights perspective.
Meanwhile, ICM’s IFFOR flowchart of “about us” community support for the alleged board of .XXX oversight – IFFOR, for .XXX responsibility management – is still merely a .JPG of “insert name here” empty spaces.
ICANN Issues A License To Print Money
What’s even more confusing than the utility of a TLD no one wanted, makes no sense and whose backers can’t even bother to back up their claims with a single person not on their payroll who thinks this is a good idea - is the very notion that ICANN has the power to make shady businessmen into billionaires overnight.
.XXX’s owners, ICM Registry, are comprised of a former real estate developer, an ex-employee from scandal-ridden domain bidding business SnapNames, and an ex-fax machine salesman turned “internet pornography and child safety consultant.”
But lest you think that ICANN is a bunch of easy pushovers anyone can just pressure and loophole and wheedle into getting them to make a dot-SEX that you happen to already own, think again. It’s not that easy.
Though not impossible, apparently.
.XXX: Pushed Until ICANN Gave In
The first time .XXX was proposed to ICANN was by Canadian real estate developer Jason Hendeles in October 2000. Turning from real estate to technology in the late 1990s, Hendeles started ICM Registry and a company called ATECH, literally short for “A Technology Company.”
(ATECH was also called NameSystem.com and was one of the early second wave of registrars to apply for ICANN accreditation in 1999. ATECH lost their ICANN accreditation on June 25, 2010 due to ATECH’s failure to pay its accreditation fees as far back as at least April 2009.)
ICM Registry first pitched the .XXX TLD to ICANN stating that .XXX would be the solution for managing adult content and protecting children - along with their other proposal .KIDS, which was to be a “green” space for children online.
These domains weren’t going to be cheap: ICM wanted $75 per customer.
[Next: The High Cost of Saving the Children]»
