UPDATE 09.01.10: The mainstream adult industry is making its opposition to .XXX loud and clear at Dot-XXX Opposition (with John Stagliano!) /update
I wrote this up last night on my tech blog Techyum in Comment Period Now Open on .XXX – Make Your Voice Heard, in part because I wanted to give people a linking option if they did not want to visit a NSFW website to get the info. In short, a few men with no ties to adult business or family groups have been trying for ten years to get ICANN to add .XXX to the selection of domain options — and they are already selling pre-registration at high prices. They scanned a list of rejected domain extensions and picked the one they could profit from the most. There has been no proof of support from any communities, despite their claims. Anti-porn organizations also oppose this. The men behind .XXX have continually skirted the issue that there is no single, universally accepted definition of adult content. There are huge security and global human rights concerns; meanwhile the men behind it are bragging to media about how much money they will make. Read about all of this in detail in the article Now Playing: .XXX. TLD Carpetbaggers Give New Meaning to “Drop and Snatch” (carnalnation.com).
On August 24 the 30-day comment period opened for the proposed .XXX top-level domain. Until September 23, the public is invited to tell ICANN what they think.
After the jump you’ll find a sample email you can send to ICANN (with address).
Image by Leonhard Kätzel via SyntheticPubes.
To: xxx-revised-icm-agreement@icann.org
Subject: Do Not Approve .XXXDear ICANN,
This email is a comment in opposition to the Proposed Registry Agreement for the .XXX sTLD by ICM Registry. The .XXX sTLD should be rejected in finality for the following reasons:
* The .xxx TLD is opposed by every sector and community it affects. This includes people working in the adult entertainment industry (including Hustler, Vivid, Penthouse, XBIZ, porn’s Free Speech Coalition, and Adult Friend Finder), anti-porn family and religious organizations (including The Family Research Council), thought leaders in the technology sector, and the ACLU.
* Despite ICM’s constant assurances of various industry representation and support, there is no evidence of community support for .XXX.
* The .xxx TLD will do nothing to solve problems surrounding adult content, manage adult content or protect children from inappropriate content. The higher purposes of ICM’s proposal have been abandoned. (As of this email the page on ICM Registry’s website about “Promoting Online Responsibility” for .XXX is blank and reads “Information to follow” as does the page titled “Contracts, Policies and Bylaws.”)
* There has been absolutely no proof of an “unmet need” for the .XXX TLD.
* There is no concrete, agreed-upon definition of “adult content.”
* The ACLU expresses serious concerns about the implications of .XXX outside the U.S., where in some countries, regulations around .XXX would certainly be enforced punitively. To this effect, the .XXX TLD raises human rights concerns.
* .XXX makes no business sense except to profit from defensive registration (brand squatting).
* Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and Mark Pryor (D-AR) have introduced legislation to make the use of .XXX compulsory for all web sites that are “harmful to minors.”
* .XXX raises serious issues around spurious and unsupported TLD’s in regard to the impact of ICANN on rulings on civil and human rights, and ICANN’s role in content-based discrimination.
In light of the above, I object to .XXX and urge ICANN to reject .XXX.
Regards,
> Kink *has* to buy their domains, because trust me, it costs FAR more to pursue brand enforcement than to buy an overpriced URL.
This is the crux point on which I disagree. I don’t think domain names are that important (and are declining in importance), I wish they were more important, it is a big part of my job and my employer (and their older clients) own a few good domain names simply because they registered the one’s they needed in the mid 90’s before the domain speculators arrived. We host a .com that clashes with a big “.org”, and sure there is a VERY small amount of traffic for them that arrives at us (and I assume vice versa), mostly because someone has put the wrong URL in when writing an article somewhere.
Does twitter.net weaken the twitter brand? No
If flickr.org is so important why don’t Yahoo put a redirect on it? Rhetorical
Had anyone seen tinynibbles.org (okay if I hadn’t mentioned it here to make the point)? No
Kink should buy the domains if type through traffic is likely to more than cover costs, otherwise it isn’t clear to me that it is a rational purchasing decision.
Might be better leaping in and trying to grab domains they know are being typed in.
notonxxx.com and notavailableonxxx.com and variants are still available at time of writing. The cost of 153,000 domain names gets you a lot of pay per click advertising, or browser plug-ins written, or other promotional effort.
I was involved in getting a domain name for a client via Snapname’s who was refunded after the dirty dealings were uncovered, so yes I know about the incident.
Darklady, yes and yes. Like 1000%. How fucking amazingly awesome that site is! And it’s yours! Even better. This insanity must be called out and stopped.
Violet, would you mind dropping my http://www.DotXXXOpposition.com and posting a comment?
Also, may I repost this on the site as an op-ed?
Simon, thanks for this fantastic comment. One of the points I’m trying to make is that if ICANN is going to be about profit from defensive reg, then we need to decide if this is the ICANN we want. Yes, Lawley will have little care about censorship, and he shouldn’t. It’s business. But what this enables in a legislative sense could be quite alarming, and politicians are taking steps to make this issue very real.
For XXX to determine “adult content” is on the table because the higher purpose proposed by Lawley and Co. involves this as a requisite, especially to fulfill the goals of their proposed nonfprofit http://www.iffor.org/
Kink themselves have publicly stated that the registrations they made with .XXX are not for expanding their business, but to squat the names of their own brands. This does not suggest, or validate a business expansion plan (a plan that benefits anyone except ICM). Kink *has* to buy their domains, because trust me, it costs FAR more to pursue brand enforcement than to buy an overpriced URL. I think .XXX are banking on this; they have lawyers, and especially one prominent behind-the-scenes-in-tech lawyer who had business ties with SnapNames and a former employee who is now working for Lawley. (Please do read up on how SnapNames VP of Engineering got caught false bidding under a fake name, scamming customers out of desirable URLs.) All I’m saying is that something is really rotten here. And the issues that they’re cavalierly throwing around for their get rich quick scheme, are serious — especially when you see the ACLU’s concerns.
No reputation blackening is intended, nor is it a goal. No one stands to gain from personal attacks here. What is essential is understanding the context of a group of businessmen who claim to speak for, and *with*, a sector that they have no background with, no qualifications (say, valid research or work in the sector), or worse, no one from the sector willing to validate that these men have a legitimate tie to the sector. They don’t know what they’re talking about, and no one from “adult” is okay with this.
I, as are many, are struggling to see the positive work ostensibly being done here. Their intentions are to make money, not to solve any of the real problems surrounding this sector, nor to invest any work to even understand what the problems really are or how to create action. Making money, fine. If that’s it, and that’s all that’s happening here, then ICANN needs to state that this is the true purpose of .XXX and other TLDs. It is absolutely unclear.
Read the published letters to ICANN in the comment forum from adult webmasters, and you’ll see that their interests are in no way aligned with customers who are writing in.
Defensive registrations are done by the rich or the stupid, or some combination, so those who plan to do them deserve little sympathy. I regard it like some spoilt kid saying “I want to be the only “Violet” in the world”, the world is big, there are other Violet’s out there, get use to it. Sure if someone tries to pass themselves of as “the Violet Blue” that is a different matter.
If we stop issuing domain names because some people think they need defensive registrations, then we will never issue any more TLDs and that would be bad.
On the other hand if kink.com is going to register 100’s of domains then suggests there is a business to be made. If it doesn’t make business sense it will fail, and ICANN will get someone else to take care of the existing registrations. Not really our call on other people’s business plans.
It isn’t up to the XXX domain to define adult content, in a voluntary registration scheme you decide if your content belongs there.
That bigoted politicians propose bigoted laws is no reason to suppose those laws will be passed, or that we shouldn’t do things. I mean they could pass a law to lock up everyone whose ever written or edited collections of erotica.
Whilst I think that the censorship issue is important, the XXX registry will have a vested interest in the domain being censored as little as possible (at least where there are paying customers), so their interests are aligned with their customers in that sense.
Snapnames only charge when you succeed, although I vaguely recall the policy may have been different in the past.
Trying to blacken a person’s reputation because someone else in a company they worked for was a crook seems rather low. The guy builds high precision Internet clocks for a hobby, that spells “geek” to me.