Hint: It has nothing to do with the actual TLD.
Were you surprised to see so many new TLD applicants advocating for ICANN to approve .xxx at the ICANN meeting last month? Regardless of their thoughts on the top level domain name and the process, they had their reasons.
I had caught wind of this a couple weeks ago, but Antony Van Couvering of Minds + Machines spells it out in explicit terms in a recent blog post:
The Board’s decision to green-light .XXX means new gTLD applicants can breathe a sigh of relief. The approval means that the new gTLDs program will not be threatened by .XXX-inspired court interference in the gTLD process. ICM Registry, .XXX’s sponsor, would almost certainly have sued ICANN if the decision had gone differently, and very likely they would have asked for an injunction to stop the introduction of new gTLDs — and they might have been successful. The ICANN Board decision to go ahead with .XXX, however heavily hedged with caveats, removes this threat. That’s good news for gTLD applicants.
There are certainly other legal threats to the introduction of new top level domain names. Depending on how it’s request for special status went (goes?), the Olympics might file suit. This might not kill new TLDs, but will certainly slow them down.
George Kirikos says
Check out the stock market reaction. TLDH (Top Level Domain Holdings) has dropped below 6 recently on the London AIM (search for “TLDH” in Google Finance). That’s a better indicator (albeit not perfect given that it’s thinly traded, etc.).
Jim Fleming says
Some of the so-called “New TLD Applicants” seem to always live in 1998 (or 2000). It is like the movie Ground Hog Day.
It is ironic, without .XXX there probably would not be an ICANN. The .COM Registry was capable of managing and evolving registrations directly into both DNS and WHOIS.
New TLDs can now emerge without ICANN and “Applicants”. One has to wonder how long the .XXX infinite loop will run before the players realize the market place has moved/changed since 1998.
isis says
Stewart Lawley is nothing but a parasite. He doesn’t care about the kids or protecting them from porn (that’s why the religious groups oppose .xxx). He doesn’t care about adult webmasters (that why the adult industry opposes .xxx). The only thing that Lawley cares about is MONEY. He is driven by pure, unadulterated GREED. All of the rest is just smoke-screens developed by the PR Firm that he hired.
roddy says
seems there was a need for something like this , although i would to know just how many applications for .xxx are from domainers ?
isis says
What really cracks me up about this is that Lawley claims he’s doing this for his son. What? Now his son can say, “My daddy’s an internet carpetbagger–a parasite–a blood-sucking leach. No, he’s never made anything. No, he’s never built anything. No, he’s never done anything for anybody. He simply makes lots and lots of money off of other people’s work. I’m so proud of my daddy.”