Proposed .XXX Web Domains in Sticky Situation with Bush   8/18/2005 - 1,173 views, 2 Comments

The .XXX top level domain, which has already been preliminarily approved by ICANN, is to be reserved for adult content, and while some suggest that providing a designated adult area on the Internet would help to keep adults-only content sandboxed so that those who don’t want to accidentally access it won’t, others, including the Bush administration and, apparently, thousands of vocal Americans, are uneasy at the prospect.

But the Bush administration has asked ICANN to delay the final vote, and many appear to agree with Patrick Trueman, of the Family Research Council, who explained that “The .xxx domain proposal is an effort to pander to the porn industry and offers nothing but false hope to an American public which wants illegal pornographers prosecuted, not rewarded. If the .xxx domain were established, pornographers would keep their lucrative ‘.com’ commercial sites and expand to even more sites on .xxx, thus becoming even more of a menace to society.”

While this perspective may border on the extreme, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Michael Gallagher has said that the U.S. Commerce Department has received close to 6,000 letters and emails regarding the .XXX domain, the vast majority of which raised concerns about how the existence of such an obvious domain would impact children who have access to the Internet.

Of course, the reality is that well-known, legal adult websites such as Danni’s Hard Drive are not going to give up their established .com homes voluntarily, and if they were required to move from .com to .xxx, that would represent some real, and probably insurmountable, constitutional issues.
Nobody is really sure how this will be resolved, but ICANN is surely between a rock and a hard place, having given preliminary approval to the .XXX tld, but needing the support of the administration at time when ICANN’s control of certain Internet resources is being questioned.

For now the final vote on the .XXX domain has been put on hold until at least the group’s next formal meeting, which is schedule for September 15th.