.xxx: Final nix

Well, final except that ICM - the would-be dot-xxx registrar that has been working on the establishment of a Web “red-light district” for seven years - says a lawsuit against ICANN is “likely,” the International Herald Tribune reports. ICANN, which manages the Web’s domain names, first rejected the dot-xxx domain in 2000, and ICM resubmitted its proposal in 2004. Key to ICANN’s final decision this time was the Canadian government’s warning this past week that “a decision to approve dot-xxx, could put the agency, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, in the tricky business of content regulation, having to decide which sites are pornographic and which are not.” The final decision was 9-5 against in “an open board meeting, with each of the voting members explaining their reasoning.” In his commentary, BlogSafety.com’s co-director Larry Magid writes, “Despite years of advocacy on the part of its sponsors, I remain unconvinced that that the .XXX top level domain would have furthered the causes of child protection or free speech. It might have been effective had it been mandatory for all porn sites, but that would have brought up enormous free speech issues that many of us would not fathom. Because it would have been voluntary, there would continue to be porn sites with .com TLDs, possibly giving parents a false sense of security by believing that all porn was walled off.”