The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organisation that determines which suffixes - such as .com or .uk - can be added to the internet, has announced that it will start registering .xxx by making checks on ICM Registry, the company that wants to run the domain and sell registrations. It marks the closing stages of a ten-year battle by ICM Registry, now run by the British internet entrepreneur Stuart Lawley, to get the .xxx domain set up so that legal pornography sites can be found in a single grouping.
But is this a good thing? Many pornography companies are unhappy with the idea of a dedicated space online because they expect that as soon as .xxx is implemented, conservative members of the US Congress will lobby to make any sex-related website re-register there and remove itself from other domains such as .com or .org. That would mean that sex sites could be more easily filtered out from web searches and lower their revenues. My main concern however, is that sites about topics seen by US conservatives as controversial, such as homosexuality, might also be forced to use the .xxx suffix.
Lawley says he expects to make $30m (£20m) a year in revenue by selling each .xxx site for $60. Despite his pledge to donate $10 from each sale to child protection initiatives, there seems to be only one winner here. And it ain't you.
