No consensus over .xxx at ICANN public forum

Stephen Withers
Friday, 30 March 2007 15:19

Your IT - Home IT

Comments in favour of the proposal were opened by Stuart Lawley, president and CEO of ICM Registry. "ICM has gone well beyond what was required of any other sTLD applicant and well beyond what was reasonably required in reference to its application," he said.

.xxx would "bring concrete new value to the global name space and the Internet community as a whole by facilitating badly needed voluntary industry self-regulation," and there is a precisely defined and demonstrably appropriate sponsored community that strongly supports the proposal, he said.

"These supporters hail from all around the world. From Australia to Zambia, with Latvia and 70 other countries in between."

Robert Corn-Revere, a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine and ICM Registry's lawyer, questioned the Free Speech Coalition's standing as a representative of the adult industry, describing it as "a small California-based group that got its start as legal defense fund in the early 1990s."

"[T]o bill it as the only organization that can represent people who want to sign up for dot xxx is simply incorrect," he said.

Not all the speakers took a position either way. For example, Ron Andruff said "we have to look at this and find a place where we can make sure that parents don't have to sit beside their children when they're on the Internet, but they can allow their children to have access in a more controlled environment."

Read the entire transcript at ICANN's web site.