.xxx gets the go-ahead from ICANN

Stephen Withers
Monday, 21 March 2011 12:23

IT Industry - Development

The ICANN board has gone against the advice of its government advisory committee and approved a proposal for a .xxx domain.

Who says tenacity doesn't pay off? After more than a decade, a proposal to establish a .xxx top level domain (TLD) as a home for 'adult' content on the Internet has been approved by the ICANN board. The decision was made in the face of concerns expressed by the ICANN government advisory committee (GAC).

ICM Registry's proposal for .xxx dates back to 2004, although there were earlier attempts to establish such a TLD. Much of the debate over the years has been technical in the sense of focusing on whether ICANN's processes and criteria had been correctly applied.

In mid 2010 it was determined that ICM had met the required criteria for establishing a sponsored TLD.

However, the GAC was still not happy, and advised the board that there was no active support by the GAC for the introduction of .xxx, and that some members were emphatically opposed to it from a public policy perspective. Furthermore, "an introduction of a .xxx TLD into the root might lead to steps taken by some governments to prohibit access to this TLD. The GAC therefore calls the Board's attention to concerns expressed  by experts that such steps bear a potential risk/threat to the universal resolvability and stability of the DNS."

The board pointed out that the support of the GAC is not a required criterion, and that "if some blocking of the .xxx sTLD does occur there's no evidence the result will be different from the blocking that already occurs."

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