Arguments and antitrust lawsuit could be made against many top level domain names.
Manwin Licensing, the company behind YouPorn, has sued .xxx registry ICM Registry for violating the Sherman Act (i.e. monopoly).
If you read the complaint against ICM you could substitute other top level domains for .xxx and the suit would still make sense.
Manwin says .xxx wasn’t put out to competitive bid, has no price caps, and ICM Registry gets presumptive renewal. It also complains about having to pay high fees for defensive registration.
The same thing could be said for new TLDs that will be applied for starting next year.
According to Manwin:
There is no reasonable substitute for defensive registration in .XXX. For example, by blocking use of a domain name in a TLD other than .XXX, the name holder does not prevent the harm suffered if a non-owner registers that name in the XXX TLD. The .XXX TLD thus constitutes a separate antitrust market for
defensive registrations.
…and later:
ICM currently has a complete monopoly in TLDs that have a name connoting adult content. There are currently no other TLDs beside .XXX with names that connote adult content.
Hmm. For existing TLDs, couldn’t you say the same thing about .org? .mobi?
And just wait for .nyc, .law, etc.
If Manwin gets anywhere in its lawsuit, you can expect this to build momentum against the new TLD program.
(I’m not predicting that the company will have any success with its suit.)
One of the more humorous parts of the lawsuit is this complaint:
ICM submitted partial and redacted information concerning persons purportedly supportive of its application who were allegedly involved in the adult entertainment industry, but who in fact appeared not to have been involved in the industry.
Kind of like the homeless guy who held a picket sign against .xxx for Free Speech Coalition?
Why file the suit, and why file it now?
Maybe it’s professional jealousy that someone is finally making money from internet porn again.
I have a blog concerning Manwin and their oh so great motives. They have threatened me many times to take the domain down but not the content. They stated i should move the content elsewhere as they know it is all true. You can get up to speed on the inner workings of Manwin at Manwinsucks.com.
Also in regards to this new development, Manwin has had trouble with their own company domains in TLD’s such as CO and NET. This lawsuit is ridiculous to me and you can catch a glimpse of the Adult community and what they think of this at the following link. http://gfy.com/showthread.php?t=1046094
The war has begun
@It also complains about having to pay high fees for defensive registration.The same thing could be said for new TLDs that will be applied for starting next year.
HUH? don’t you think a persons name or company in .XXX is a bit different then a persons name or company in say…….org,.mobi,nyc,.law etc.
“don’t you think a persons name or company in .XXX is a bit different then a persons name or company in say”
They didn’t argue that much.
But what about .gay and .religion domains? I’m sure big companies wouldn’t want company.catholic that then has disparaging information about Catholicism.
What happened to my comments? Did I make too much sense criticizing your article??
It’s a very well written complaint, in my opinion, and shows that the law firm did their research. Steve Metalitz is an attorney at MSK (although not mentioned in the complaint), who certainly knows his way around ICANN.
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend”. 🙂
BTW, ICANN has updated its litigation page at:
http://www.icann.org/en/general/litigation.htm
with the Manwin .xxx complaint. The PDF at ICANN is better than the one at Xbiz (probably ICANN has the “original” whereas the Xbiz one appears to be an OCR of a scan).
Manwin also filed an Independent Review Proceeding at ICANN itself, see:
http://www.icann.org/en/irp/manwin-v-icann.htm
.xxx is an exception. Total sex domain that everyone has known about for years. Thus it’s popularity. I don’t see many other extensions having such built-in notoriety come release time. There may be a couple keyword extensions, but that’s all.
In a nutshell, no biggie for the other new TLDs. With the huge popularity of .xxx, Manwin should be worried.
i noticed that porn.com has started using mobile.porn and gay.porn in their sub menu. I’m guessing they are going to try and register or trademark .porn tld when the time comes.
As an adult webmaster and domainer, I love the fact that the ICM is getting sued.
Even the ANA agrees with Manwin that this is a scam. The very fact that most of the people buying .xxx domains are schools and corporations that have nothing to do with adult entertainment, because ICM is marketing all their advertising to them, proves it. They’re trying to instill fear into companies so that they pay the blackmail. The whole thing is an obvious shakedown, and anyone who can’t see that is either not paying attention or lacks the intelligence to understand.