As a 20-year veteran of the adult entertainment industry, I can tell you this isn't about controlling access to adult material. This is about money, plain and simple.
The company asking for the top-level domain is ICM Registry, which has no background and no affiliation with the very industry that this TLD would affect.
The industry does not want the .xxx TLD. We have made this very clear to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. It may be the only thing that the adult industry, the Christian right and the Bush administration will ever agree on.
The .xxx TLD would do nothing to control porn on the Internet.
Children could be protected in a much simpler way, namely by using a .kids domain with a strict oversight committee and browsers that parents can set to access only that domain. But let's face it, there isn't nearly as much money in that.
ICM Registry has gone so far as to try to bribe key adult-industry members and organizations for support.
The company offered our trade association $8 per domain sold in exchange for our support. When it was clear that we were going to turn them down, ICM Registry had enough people join the trade association to sway the vote in ICM Registry's favor.
The trade association changed the voting rules, giving a vote only to members who had been members for three months or more.
When you consider that ICM Registry would go to that length to get our approval, you have to ask yourself why.
It's because the main criteria for enacting a domain of this sort, according to ICANN rules, is the support of the industry it affects.
So far, ICM Registry has been unable to show evidence for that support, and ICANN has voted it down three times. But ICM Registry has a lot of money invested in this, so they keep suing and keep coming back.
Hopefully we can shut this bad idea down once and for all.
Finally, as a pornographer I assure you we don't want your kids getting our product.
We are fighting tooth and nail to stop most of the free, adult material on the Internet because it is in violation of our copyrights.
We do this to make money, and we don't make money when people steal our content and "share" it.
Nor do we target your children. We target people with credit cards, and your children don't have credit cards. There is no return on investment if I target my content to your children.
Please help me keep my product out of the hands of children by supporting the enforcement of copyright laws and targeting sites that make stolen, adult content available to anyone for free.
