The introduction of the controversial .xxx TLD has been delayed following the concerns of the US government and the Government Advisory Committee (GAC). Assistant Secretary at the US Department of Commerce, Michael Gallagher, wrote that the department “has received nearly 6,000 letters and e-mails from individuals expressing concern about the impact of pornography on families and children”. The Chairman of the GAC had already written to ICANN last week to warn it of the possibility of individual governments directly expressing their concerns and to urge ICANN to “allow time for additional governmental and public policy concerns to be expressed before reaching a final decision on this TLD”.
The .xxx TLD is the latest in the line of new sponsored top level domain names to be approved in principle by ICANN. sTLDs are designed for use by particular industries or sectors - .mobi received final approval last month for websites created specifically for mobile devices. ICM Registry is the organisation that would operate the .xxx sTLD – it has agreed to a one month delay to the final approval of .xxx (which was due to have be given on Tuesday), stating it “remains committed to including all affected stakeholders in policy development for the .xxx domain”.
The .xxx domain has had a tough time just getting to this stage, seen by some as a practical way of regulating pornographic material and protecting children from adult content, and by others as encouraging obscene material and lending a legitimate front to a sordid industry. The preliminary approval received in June came five years after the .xxx domain was initially proposed.
IMC Registry say that .xxx would promote self-regulation within the adult entertainment industry and would help ensure safe use of the internet for child and family user groups. Critics predict “a political and litigious firestorm over time, as various government entities move to try force "adult" sites into the new domain space, and battles erupt over what an adult site is defined to be”. Karl Auerbach, a former ICANN board member, fiercely criticised the granting of preliminary approval for .xxx in the light of ICANN’s general reluctance to create new domain names: “Why should .xxx get precedence over schools, churches, civic groups, aboriginal communities, labor organizations, and artistic groups?....[I]t is insulting to the community of internet users when ICANN hands one of those few resources to a group that intends to use it to promote the worst that humanity has to offer”.
While the opposition is certainly vociferous, I can’t help thinking that the .xxx domain seems like a sensible option for websites “of a certain sort”. It would surely make life easier for both those that want to find them and those that want to avoid them, provided that adult content providers were willing to move to .xxx domains. There is currently no legal basis for either government agencies or domain name registrars insisting that adult content must be hosted on an .xxx domain when they become available.
There is never likely to ever be a legal basis (at least one that would withstand the US court system) that would force websites “of a certain sort” into the .xxx domain space. Also, if this did ever happen there would be the problem of deciding exactly which sites need to go into this site - i.e. would sex education sites have to move there etc (and the ICM registry's definition is sufficiently ambiguous), and who would decide? The addition of this domain, and indeed others such as .mobi, merely succeed in diluting the value of other domains, such as dot com; and at $75 a domain it would seem the main beneficiaries of the approval of the .xxx domain would be the domain name registrar.
Posted by: Scott | August 22, 2005 at 12:10 PM