The Internet Now Has Its Own "Red Light District"

Internet to get its own red-light district
By Stanley Pignal in Brussels
Published: June 25 2010 17:37 | Last updated: June 25 2010 17:37
The world wide web will get its own red-light district after the body that oversees the internet’s structure overcame its reluctance over .xxx web addresses for pornographic sites.

Icann, the non-profit group that assigns internet names, said on Friday it would move forward with the suffix, putting an end to a six-year battle with ICM Registry, the US-based company that first applied to run it in March 2004.

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The first .xxx web site could come live within six to nine months, according to Stuart Lawley, ICM’s chairman, who says 112,000 .xxx addresses have already been reserved.

“I would conservatively say we will have 250,000 by the time we launch, if not closer 500,000,” Mr Lawley told the Financial Times.

Icann’s board had rejected calls for a .xxx name twice since ICM first made the request in 2004, but reviewed its decision after an outside panel questioned its reasons for doing so.

The .xxx domain is one of hundreds of new suffixes that are being created to rival .com, .net and .org as well as national domains such as .co.uk. Other registry companies are looking to register suffixes including .eco, .sport, .news and others as the rules are relaxed through 2011.

But none will prove as contentious as .xxx. 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.

The adult industry has been split on the creation of a dedicated corner of the web created for them, fearing it could be forced in the long term to move away from more conventional domains.

But despite protests from conservative groups mainly in the US, Icann reversed its decision to block the .xxx brand in a meeting in Brussels on Friday, with a near-unanimous vote of its board.

Peter Dengate Thrush, Icann’s chairman, said prurience played no part in the approval process. “We’re not in the content business. That’s up to national governments. What the applicant does with [a web address] is very much up to the applicant – he will have to deal with authorities over content.”

As part of its lobbying campaign, ICM, which once also tried to register the .kids domain, has committed to label its content so it can be filtered more easily. It will also impose a $10 levy per year per website towards public awareness initiatives.

Mr Lawley said .xxx websites registrations would cost $60 each, far more than.com websites. “What we’re hoping to do is to create a sort of quality mark for the adult industry, where customers feel more confident to return and spend money,” he said.

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.

“It’s a way for people to use the internet entirely in their own language, their own script,” Mr Dengate Thrush of Icann said. “It gets rid of any sort of colonial vestige associated with the web.”