Thursday, March 29, 2007

ICANN: Tech Daily 'Overdose' On .XXX

The group that oversees the Internet-addressing system has been meeting in Lisbon, Portugal this week on a variety of interesting issues but the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has saved the hottest topic for the last day of the conference.

The ICANN board on Friday plans to decide the fate of a proposed .xxx ending for Web addresses that publish pornography. On Thursday, the organization held a public forum where fans and foes of the plan spoke out.

Free Speech Coalition Executive Director Diane Duke skewered ICM Registry and its president Stuart Lawley, who first proposed the domain suffix in 2000. She said the adult entertainment community, whom FSC represents, not only opposes ICM's plan "but it actively opposes the creation of a .xxx top-level domain."

ICANN board member Peter Dengate Thrush asked why members of the adult content sector who want to be a part of .xxx form a subset of FSC's community. Duke said she has not yet found anyone in her constituency who favors the virtual red-light district.

ICM outside counsel Robert Corn-Revere said FSC cannot be compared to other trade groups, like the Motion Picture Association of America, because it is a small California-based operation that got its start as a legal defense fund. "Their work in this area is valuable but it hardly qualifies them as the only trade association in the area," he said.

Lawley responded to criticism at the forum, saying ICM has demonstrated that .xxx will "bring concrete new value to the global name space and the Internet community as a whole by facilitating badly needed voluntary industry self-regulation." ICM has already received more than 77,000 pre-registrations for the .xxx domain.

Pre-registration has continued as ICM awaited the ICANN board's vote, with hundreds of requests coming in daily, he said. "This demonstrated support far outweighs the opposition generated by webmasters who are potentially not part of the defined community," he said.

Meanwhile, Phil Corwin, who represents the Internet Commerce Association, said his group does not have a position for or against the creation of the adults-only domain -- as long as it remains voluntary. The group does, however, object to contract terms that it feels would place ICANN in a position removed from its technical management role.