Last week in San Francisco the ICANN board approved the launch on .xxx domain names by a vote of 9 to 3 (with 3 abstentions). This vote paves the way for .xxx domain names to be launched this year.

So who will be the winner in all this? You may think that this is a victory for the Adult industry but you would be wrong. They are totally against the idea and protests have been raging for months about this. From their point of view this is the last thing they want. They do not want to be “catagorised” in such a way. They rely on miss types, casual visitors and people visiting their sites when they shouldn’t be. So by making all adult sites end with the suffix .xxx it will become easy for restrictions to be put on outbound Internet traffic.

Just as companies easily cut down on 0898 chat lines a few years ago when the numbering system was changed in the UK then so will it become easy for companies to put on content filters on any sites ending in .xxx. The result? visitors to the sites plummet, advertising revenues dry up and die.

But what about brand owners? Will they rush out to protect their brand by registering .xxx domain names? ICANN have already started this discussion so that brands can protect their names. BMW.xxx will not revert to an adult site but will potentially just resolve to a blank holding page. All good stuff for them.

And who will police the Internet to ensure that adult content is re-classified as a .xxx domain name? The Internet is like the wild west at the best of times so I do not expect to see any new regulatory body being created to “protect and serve”, or to define what an adult site actually is.

Moral groups, especially in the USA are also up in arms about the decision. They see this as a move to legitimise pornography, making it easier for our children to be lured to the dark side. Whilst this may be true to an extent, as we have discussed above few content holders actually want to adopt the new name as it is.

So who is the winner? Well, potentially no one. It is early days so we will keep our eyes peeled to see what happens next.

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