iEstates.com

After I read DomainNameWire.com coverage of the ICANN resolution on the .XXX Extension and the very negative comments that followed the post,  I reached out to Stuart Lawley, CEO of the ICM registry.

In Andrew’s post here stated:

“”It may not be a quick process, and a new can of worms will be opened allowing for another comment period on the actual registry contract.”

However Mr Lawley, who I reached as he was attending the Internext Adult Internet show in Hollywood Florida, was “very  pleased” with the outcome of yesterday board action.

Why?

First The board’s resolution means that the ICM Registry has passed its due diligence requirements.

Second, the ICM Registry has completed it negotiations on a contract with the ICANN Staff and expects that the contract will be post by ICANN mid-next week.

Third the ICM registry expects that the ICANN board will vote on the contract by the next possible board meeting which is scheduled for September 23-24th.

Here is the time line as ICM see’s it:

Contract posted next week, lets call it August 10th.

30 days comment period will run like August 10th-September 10th

As to the comment period, the only issue is on the contract and the language of the contract.

Although we can expect hundreds or even thousands of comments objecting to the extension, none of that will matter at this point, as the only comments the board can consider are comments relating to the actual contract.

Under the resolution passed yesterday, the Staff must summarize comments and submit them to the board with its recommendations by the next Board meeting which is scheduled for September 23/24th.

As far the issue of the staff determining whether the contract is consistent with GAC Advice, the ICM registry says the same staff that they just negoitated the contract with, is the  very same staff that will make recommendation to board.

Therefore its going to be very tough for that same staff to now tell the board the contract they just negotiated was not consistent with GAC advice.

Therefore ICM fully expects that staff will recommend to board that contract is in accordance with GAC advice and thereby expects to vote on the contract at the September 23/24th meeting.

If for some reason ICANN misses that date their are other board meeting scheduled in October and November of this year, before the ICANN meeting in Colombia in December

Bloomberg/BusinessWeek just published a story about the tentative approval of .XXX by ICANN and the CEO of the ICM registry, Stuart Lawley entitled “The Man Who Would Be The Dot-XXX King“.

You will have to read the whole story which you can find here, but here are a couple of the more interesting points;

Mr. Lawley is a very wealthy guy.

According to the article he was named by the London Sunday Times as one of the richest 1,000 people in England, having taken an ISP public.

As part of the .xxx extension, Lawley plans on offering “a payment business similar to PayPal for dot-xxx sites, which he says could process $3 billion to $4 billion in transactions a year.”

You read it right, $3 to $4 BILLION dollars in transactions a year and the payment platform would only be opened to those sites that were using the .xxx extension.

If this becomes true, he is going to be moving up the list of the top 1,000, which when published in 2000, had Mr. Lawley ranked 338 tied with none other than George Harrison of the Beatles.

To read the full article click here

Certainly nothing has been in the domain news, even the general news much more in the past few days than the tenative approval of the .XXX extension by ICANN.

Beyond the ICM registry who owns the .XXX TLD, the biggest other beneficiary very well maybe the owner of XXX.com.

Now you will have the chance to be that guy, the owner of XXX.com because that domain is hitting the auction block at Domainfest New York on August 18th.

The reserve price is stated to be in excess of $5 Million Dollars.

No doubt that the value of the domain XXX.com grew once .XXX registry got its tentative approval.

The ICM registry has approximately $10 Million invested in the .XXX registry to date and promises to heavily promote the .XXX extension once final approval is given by ICANN which should occur sometime this year.

You would think this domains traffic, which is already considerable will grow substantially once the .XXX registry rolls out.

On the negative side, the ICM registry has spent approximately $10 Million in getting the entire .XXX registry to date and we don’t know what the actual number is.

Also owning XXX.com does not give you any rights to getting XXX.XXX and no one knows how much traffic will be diverted in the future from adult .com sites to .XXX sites.

It’s certainly the most timely domain in the 200 Million +, universe of domain registrations and it will be VERY interesting to if the domain sells, if it does,  how much it will sell for and again if it sells who the buyer will be.

We will keep our eye on this one.

I learned that both Stuart Lawley from the ICM Registry, who got tentative approval for .XXX last week and none other than Bob Parsons from Godaddy.com will be on the same program tonight on the Fox Business Channel at 8PM EST.

They both will appearing separately on a new  program called “Money Rocks”

Fox Business Channel can be seen on channel 359 on Directv and I assume many cable networks throughout the country.

It should be interesting, not to be missed television on domain name night on Fox Business.

Someone post the YouTube.com link when they find it.

I saw literally hundreds of articles today on the conditional passage of the .xxx extension by ICANN and everyone seemed to miss a very important point.

.XXX isn’t just for adult content.

Sure the intent of the extension if for porn sites to use .XXX domains, but in fact there is nothing that requires any site using a .XXX extension to displaying porn.

So you certainly could sell cars under cars.xxx or computers under computers.xxx.

Just look at the headlines of Major media mainstream publications:

CNet.com writes, “ICANN OKs .xxx domain name for porn sites”

CNN.com writes: “Porn sites get their own domain, .XXX”

ZNet.com: ICAAN appoves .xxx domain name for porn sites

Just to name a few.

All of these publications simply miss the fact that the extension is going to be even more muddled as non-adult sites are equally eligible for registration of .xxx domains.

Let’s not forget our trademark friends who are I’m sure shuttering over the inevitable registrations like verizonphones.xxx, iphone.xxx, the thousands of variations and typos.  Its one thing for having you brand squatted on a .com and quite another for it to appear on the .xxx extension.

At the same time people will be able to register glasses.xxx, they will be contributing $10 to a non-profit company for child protection initiatives that ICM will set up.

This forced contribution is an issue.

A registry is suppose to charge fees for the maintenance and operation of the registry.

I don’t know where ICANN has the authorization to allow registries, to collect forced contributions for non-profit causes as part of a registration and renewal fee, and I have no idea of how the registrant of say applejuice.xxx would need to, nor necessarily  want to contribute to a fund to protect child.

I think this part of the proposal is a real issue that will have to be dealt with.

Now that .XXX has the full attension of the media, the media needs to get the story right.

As we told you they would yesterday the ICANN board made it official today and voted to approve the .XXX extension.

I spoke to ICM’s founder Stuart Lawley yesterday shortly after the vote and he told me he would expect the first .XXX domains to go live by no later than 1Q 2011.

In an article published by the AP today, Mr. Lawley is quoted as saying he expects .xxx to attract at “least 500,000 registrations”,  citing the 110,000 reservations ICM has already received.

He was further quoted as saying:

“I think we could do a million or more. There are several million adult TLDs already out there”

So the question is how many .xxx registrations are you predicting that there will be after one year of full operation.

The expected retail price for a .xxx registration is $60 per year.

Please make your choice on the right and of course feel free to comment below.

According to Kieren McCarthy ICANN’s general counsel read a statement at the start of the public forum at the current ICANN meeting in Brussel, stating that the Board had accepted the results of the independent review panel and thus would approve the .xxx TLD tomorrow. The board had delayed the decision until the 38th ICANN meeting in order to gather additional comments from the public.

The board would then enter the contract negotiations with application ICM Registry and then refer the contract to the Governmental Advisory Committee since they had raised concerns in the past.

This decision would ignore the lobbying of the adult industry against the new extension, however the registry might have some challenges selling domains under the new TLD.

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com

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In an ICANN public forum held in Brussels today, it appears ICANN is set to approve the .XXX  tomorrow.

Citing the findings of the independent review panel which found that ICANN acted against its own rules when it rejected the .XXX extension, it appears ICANN board has no choice but to approve the extension.

Early indications is that the ICM registry will have to jump through just a couple of more hoops but passage looks certain.

As a domainer I have been against the extension, as I see no benefit to adult domain holders who will have to register defensive registrations generally at some 6x the cost of a .com.

However as an attorney I recognized that ICM is entitled to the extension based on the findings of the panel.

Although by definition the arbitration’s findings are not binding, both the ICM registry and ICANN spent millions of dollars on that proceeding and therefore I cannot rationally  see how the panels finding is not going to be honored.

New gTLD applicants seem to be overwhelming in support the approval of .XXX because they don’t want to suffer the same fate.

When these applicants put up a couple of hundred thousand dollars for a new extension, plus substantial other costs, they want to be assured if they ‘follow the rules” that there application won’t be denied at the end of the process by the board for a subjective reason.

Of course the final vote of the board isn’t until tomorrow and it being ICANN anything I guess an happen but I don’t think ICANN has any choice based on the finding of the Panel.

While everyone involved in ICANN topics is gearing up to fly to Brussels for the 38th ICANN meeting, the travelers are joined by the Free Speech Coalition’s (FSC, trade organization of the adult industry) Executive Director Diane Duke and FSC Board Vice President Tom Hyme. The two are attending the ICANN meeting to lobby against a potential approval of the .XXX sTLD by ICANN’s board.

“I am honored to be going to Brussels with Diane,” said Hymes, who traveled to Wellington in 2005 for the same purpose. “The fact that so much time has gone by has done nothing to diminish the dangers posed by dot XXX. Yes, it should never have been resurrected from the dead in the first place, but it was and now we need to be there, reminding the ICANN Board and staff at every turn that dot XXX has no industry support, and also that the last thing in the world they want to be is the ultimate arbiter of a policy-setting IFFOR (International Foundation for Online Responsibility). Believe me, that scenario would be hell on earth for ICANN.”

Diane had already spoken against the release of the .XXX sTLD at the 2007 ICANN meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, where the ICANN board rejected the application by ICM registry. ICM had then asked ICANN to have an independent review panel look over the decision. The review panel concluded that ICANN should not have rejected the application after first approving it. The decision was tabled again, but delayed at the 37th ICANN meeting in Nairobi, Kenya earlier this year in order to ask the public for additional comments.

Conservative oriented organizations have been speaking out against introducing a .XXX extension as well as the adult industry.

[via AVN]

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com

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Now that the comment period for the .XXX extension has closed, the ICM Registry sent a letter to ICANN asking them to make a decision on the extension.

In the letter ICM states in part:

“”"ICM, having been a respectful and diligent member of the ICANN community, and having invested many millions of dollars and a full seven years in trying to bring .XXX to fruition, calls upon the Board to act decisively and with finality on this matter.  Over the years, every interested voice has been heard, many of them repeatedly, and their comments have been studied endlessly; many thousands of pages of documents have been reviewed by some of the sharpest legal minds in the world, and all that remains is for the Board to act on their determination.”"

“”Further delays and needless, repetitive processes are no longer acceptable.  We ask you to produce the final and obvious decision on this matter.”"

“It is clear there is no appetite from any party for any further elongated process or delay—a sentiment with which ICM agrees heartily.  Te community, along with many others, have spoken. It is now incumbent on the Board to make a clear decision.”

“Either move forward decisively to execute a registry agreement with ICM, without delay, or reject the Declaration of the Panel of legal experts and the wishes of the ICANN community, and deal with the consequences of that decision.”

However, I have to wonder if ICM has missed the boat, not due any failure of their own, but recongizing that  since its original application, the adult online world has changed.

And not for the better.

We have talked about this reality before in reference to the sale of Sex.com

Today we received this notice from WegCash.com a large adult affiliate program that has been in operation for more than 10 years:

“”"Today’s communication with our affiliates comes after much deliberation, as well as a heavy heart. After 10 years, and millions of dollars in affiliate payouts, Wegcash has decided that the continuation of the affiliate program is no longer sustainable. Therefore, we will no longer be accepting referrals effective May 21st, at 4PM PST.”

“”"The reasons, many of which are obvious to all of us, revolve around the decline in membership revenue. The continued proliferation of free adult videos has spawned a market which does not support an affiliate program.”"

As you get older the one thing you realize that you cannot buy, recoup or make up for is “time”.

Had ICM been allowed to sell domains using the .XXX extension years ago, IMHO a LOT more domains would have been registered than in today’s market where the adult industry is struggling in light of the overwhelming amount of free content in the form of tube sites on the net.

PPC revenue on adult domains are a fraction of what they were a few years ago.

Adult sites simply cannot convert visitors to paying customers which trickles down to domain holders and PPC revenue.

Where a few years ago I may have tried to register thousands  of domains with a .XXX extension, In today’s market, my wish list, would be in the hundreds.

On the bigger picture, the rollout of hundreds or thousands of new extensions, I think ICM makes a important point in its letter:

“”"One such organizational consequence that the comment period should bring into focus for the Board is the very real possibility that ICANN’s documented processes could be subject to a “Hecklers’ Veto.” If so, then any potential new gTLD applicant will undoubtedly have to take note that a determined and organized special interest group will be able to successfully derail its application or, at very least, tie it up in knots for years.  As a consequence, prospective gTLD applicants will certainly watch ICANN’s response to the IRP Declaration and this public comment period with great interest.”"”

They’re right.

The religious right, which has opposed .XXX for years now, isn’t going to be too thrilled when .Gay seeks approval as a TLD or .Religion, .God, .Abortion, or even .Playboy.

Is ICANN going to bow to the pressure of every organized group which opposes an extension?

Its a fair question.

I guess we will have to wait for a while for the answer.