Despite being turned down by ICANN, Dot XXX sponsor ICM Registry simply will not give up. DomainesInfo talks to ICM's boss Stuart Lawley about the future he's certain Dot XXX has.
Okayed by ICANN only to be turned down a few months later, Dot XXX just will not go away. ICM Registry have appealed to have the recent ICANN board decision against the creation of Dot XXX reversed. And they've litigated against the US government whom they suspect had more than a slight hand in getting the adult domain stopped dead in its tracks.
But these appeals and litigation cases can be drawn out affairs and in the meantime, how do you keep your employees and systems busy when you've geared up to launch a new domain only to have it blocked at the last minute? ICM Registry's answer is to go ahead and start collecting pre-reservations for Dot XXX just as they would have done had the domain been launched as planned after first getting the green light from ICANN last year.
ICM Registry President and CEO Stuart Lawley explains the procedure, the thinking behind it, and gives us an update on the current state of litigation to have Dot XXX approved.
Can you tell us more about your pre reservation service? It is open to three grades of registrants. Either members of the adult entertainment industry themselves, who can come in to apply to pre reserver their existing name strings that they have in Dot FR, Dot CO.UK, Dot COM, etc. It's also open to non-members of the community, that can apply to register their famous brands, if they already own Citröen, Renault or Ford for example. They can apply to be first in line to register ford.xxx for defensive purposes. And finally for registrars, so they can come in and say "look, we want to lock these down on behalf of they can do that on behalf of our customers, these are the names we already control for our customers and we want to make sure they've got their first shout over these names." In the case where there are multiple applications for the same domain, because people own it in several existing TLDs, there will be a tiebreak. None of this cuts across anyone's IP rights or their appeal under the UDRP or the Start Up Opposition Procedure that we will have. So there will be a right to challenge if somebody doesn't win and the name gets awarded to someone else.
There's no charge for doing this. The reason we're doing it is several fold. To prove to ICANN the level of demand for this TLD and to show the rest of the world the demand for it. To use our own resources because this appeal process that we're in with ICANN is probably not going to be a short one. I would guess it's going to be several months to say the least. But we have these processes built and we're employing staff, so rather than have them sitting around doing nothing we thought we might as well utilize them.
You mentioned a cut-off date for applicants for the pre reservation service and you plan to go by existing domain names… Generally most people do a first come first served or a sunrise system. And all the sunrise periods have tended to be subject to massive fraud with people applying for trademarks with different jurisdictions all around the world. Clearly the idea behind Dot XXX was to encourage a migration, from the existing TLDs into Dot XXX. So the last thing that the adult industry itself wanted, and don't forget this TDL is primarily for them, but also I don't think the rest of the world, the politicians, the parents… was a whole bunch of new owners owning all that real estate in a new TLD because that would in effect double the amount of pornography on the Net. Whereas the whole idea here was the existing owner in Dot COM, Dot FR whatever gets the Dot XXX. There will be one site underneath. There'll be two doorways to it, the existing Dot COM and the Dot XXX doorway. The Dot XXX will have the warning signs on it. The site underneath would have the labels attached to the site, so that it doesn't matter if there's another doorway over here that's got a Dot FR on it or the same doorway with a Dot CO.UK. If the site underneath has to be labelled, which is one of the requirements of having a Dot XXX, we've automatically tripled the number of labels out there. And ultimately, whether it's Dot XXX, Dot FR, Dot CO.UK or Dot COM, the domain name doesn't matter if the site itself has an RDF machine readable label in and people are using filters, it will pick that up and filter it out regardless of which domain it's coming in from. So that was the benefit of making sure that the existing owners got the existing name. Clearly the issue you do have is that some of these names are already owned in multiple TLDs and there can only be one winner. So you then have to find a fair and equitable way to allocate it between owners.
So if Microsoft want their name they have to have registered Microsoft in another ICANN- accredited TLD… Yes, to prevent people from rushing out and registering Microsoft in another TLD, the existing domain has to have been registered by May 1st 2006.
What happens to the pre reservations once and if Dot XXX goes live? This is all academic for the moment… Yes and we've made that clear, we've put suitable disclaimers on it and said that this may never happen. So we're not charging anyone, there's no fee for doing this. However if it does go ahead, this will be the allocation method. So if we've closed the door, it will be no good applying later. So if you're in the business and you want to save your names from an IP protection or you're in the adult industry, put your name down now. I mean this is something we were probably going to run anyway and we were going to charge 5 $ a domain for the privilege of doing it. It was going to be like an early bird system that was going to be a profit generator for us. But now we're trying to keep our people busy and it's a great opportunity for people to do this and if need be, we will help the registrars identify their adult base. We can go through the WHOIS and identify the adult names that you own and say "look, these are the people, reach out to them". The eventual winner will get an electronic token that they can go back to the registrar with and spend if and when Dot XXX gets approved.
Can you tell us what the status of the litigation is and if you are optimistic that ICANN will hear your appeal? So far we've filed a reconsideration motion under ICANN's bylaws which generally, not prejudging ours, they haven't been great successes. I think many of them have been sort of viewed as a whitewash I guess. Our second string in the bow would be independent review, which nobody has ever done with ICANN before and we think that this process has been so flawed and the obstructions are so obvious to anyone, we're pretty confident that any kind of independent review, be it by an arbitrator or be it a judicial independent review, we would feel very confident that the way ICANN has treated us wouldn't be seen to be a fair and above board way. We have litigated against the United States Dept. of Commerce and Dept. of State to force them to turn over extra redacted documents under their Freedom of Information Act, which we think will show even further evidence of the depth of their meddling and their influence over the ICANN decision. At this stage we have not issued any legal proceedings against ICANN although we clearly reserve the right to do so.
How long can you keep on going without selling anything? We've already put about 2.5 million dollars into this application. Fortunately we do have deep pockets. We do have the time and we do have the money which I'm hoping will be good news for us and bad news for ICANN. From our perspective this was going to be a very serious business venture and very lucrative on our part so the opportunity is worth pursuing for us. Timescale wise I think ICANN will try and push this out past the renewal of the MoU. I think that's a sort of watershed event. The midterm elections in the US may be a watershed event for keeping the religious right happy in the US. So maybe a few months down the line. But litigation is litigation and that could spin out further. But we've spent six years so far on this and fulltime the last three years so we're in for whatever it takes.
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