Friday, March 30, 2007

ICANN: .XXX Rejected

A divided ICANN board voted against a proposed .xxx ending for domain names that publish pornography on Friday. Nine board members, including Chairman Vint Cerf, voted to reject ICM Registry's latest offer, and five members voted for it. ICANN President Paul Twomey abstained from the roll-call vote. Read the full story in Technology Daily's PM edition.

Reactions were plentiful and a number of perspectives did not make it into the story, so here are a few:

Internet Commerce Association counsel Phil Corwin lauded ICANN's action. He told us immediately after the board's vote that his group opposed the deal because it would inevitably involve ICANN in "content regulation and other public policy responsibilities far beyond its narrow technical mandate."

Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People For Internet Responsibility, strongly endorsed the decision to reject the top-level domain and commended ICANN for its work on the issue. Weinstein added that "controversies regarding 'adult entertainment' content on the Internet aren't going to vanish as a result of this vote."

Focus on the Family analyst Daniel Weiss cheered the board's decision. He said rejecting .xxx is "great news for families around the world." "This idea held out false hope for parents concerned with filth on the Internet," he said. "It's a strange notion to suggest that we can help kids by sanctioning, endorsing and proliferating the very material that threatens them."

The nonprofit Family Online Safety Institute was disappointed with the result. According to the organization, whose mission is to promote best practices, tools and methods for family online safety, the ruling "represents a step in the wrong direction and fails to offer the additional protection children need online."

FOSI CEO Stephen Balkam said the ICANN resolution erroneously asserted that .xxx "avoids the protection of vulnerable members of the community." He said the proposal was actually an important self-regulatory effort in the field of Web safety and "passing it up only hurts parents and children."

Meanwhile, ICANN board member Susan Crawford posted her vigorous dissent to the majority's decision on her blog. It's definitely worth checking out.

High-tech attorney Wendy Seltzer said she never thought .xxx was a good idea, but believes even more strongly "that ICANN shouldn't be in the business of judging 'good ideas' or making content-based judgments" about new TLDs. ICM's scheme would not cause technical problems in the root zone, and so should be entitled to its domain, she said on her blog.