Online porn domain .xxx gets the green light from net regulator

Published on Friday 25 June 2010 22:05

OFFICIAL approval has been given for the creation of an internet domain dedicated to pornography.

The board of the net regulator Icann has given initial approval for the creation of the .xxx suffix at its Brussels conference.

It follows three unsuccessful attempts by a private company to get permission for a porn-only site from Icann,

the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, using the name and web address suffixes such as .com and .org.

ICM Registry chief executive Stuart Lawley said Icann was under pressure from Christian groups and governments unhappy with the spread of online pornography to reject his bid since he first tried to register the domain in 2000.

Under criticism from an outside panel, the agency's board acknowledged yesterday that it had not treated the application fairly, saying it would now move swiftly to carry out standard checks on the company.

Mr Lawley said the new suffix could easily attract at least 500,000 sites, making it after ".mobi" the second biggest sponsored top-level domain.

Pornography is ubiquitous on the internet, with the word "sex" accounting for a quarter of all web searches, according to one estimate cited by ICM.

Mr Lawley expects to make 20million a year in revenue by selling each .xxx site for 40 – and pledges to donate 4 from each sale to child protection initiatives through a non-profit agency he has set up.

He also says he will make it easy for web blocking software to filter out ".xxx" sites by requiring them to carry a machine-readable metatag marking them clearly as porn.

"It will promote more labelled content," he said.

"People who want to find it know where it is and people who don't see it or want to keep it away from their kids can use mechanisms to do so."

Critics said pornography sites would probably keep existing ".com" storefronts to allow their businesses to be found more easily. There is no requirement for porn sites to use .xxx.

The adult entertainment industry is worth some 9 billion a year, according to the California-based Adult Video News Media Network. Mr Lawley already has 110,000 reservations for the new domain, he said, and could get the suffix up and running within six to nine months, after Icann checks that ICM has the financial means and technical know-how to run it.

Icann admitted its refusal to accept .xxx was "not consistent with the application of neutral, objective and fair documented policy." It agreed to swiftly re-examine the ".xxx" application.

It is the first time that Icann has been effectively forced to review a decision.

The body had said it was only obliged to follow the law of California, where it is based, but then agreed to follow the findings of the accountability review by a panel drawn from the internet community.

Icann also announced the introduction of Chinese script in top-level domain names. That would allow Chinese users to type an entire web-address in non-roman script, including the suffix. Other languages such as Arabic had already been approved.