Top Tech News

SAN FRANCISCO – You've heard of ".com" and ".org." Joining them soon module be their bawdy cousin: ".xxx."

On Friday, the commission of directors of the cyberspace Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees the Internet's naming system, approved the creation of a red-light district online for pornographic websites. It follows a decade-long battle over such a name.

The katzenjammer over the intent has brought together implausible bedfellows.

Religious groups debate that gift grown websites their possess corner of the cyberspace legitimizes the content.

Pornographers worry it module ghettoize their sites. Although it's meant to be voluntary, they fear governments could essay to mandate the domain's use, so that pornographic noesis is more easily blocked.

Diane Duke, executive director of the grown recreation industry's Free Speech Coalition, said in a statement that ICANN has "disregarded resistless flowing of contestant from the grown recreation industry — the questionable sponsorship community" and unemployed the "interests of free style on the Internet."

Supporters hit serviceable that approbatory the field is in ownership with the principle of openness that has oxyacetylene the Internet's growth.

While the intent of ".xxx" has provoked a philosophical debate, for the U.S. company that submitted the covering for the domain, the issue is lowercase more than a matter of dollars and cents.

ICM Registry and its CEO, royalty Lawley, who has led the fisticuffs for ICANN's support of ".xxx," stand to profit handsomely from the rollout of ".xxx" websites — because he module be in calculate of collecting fees for the ingest of the new domains.

Lawley plans to calculate registrars $60 per assemblage for the field names. He estimates that he could delude as many as 500,000 by the time he rolls them discover this summer.

"This was always going to be a very lucrative arrangement," he said in an interview Friday.

Lawley's prices hit been a grave issue for opponents to his plan, since field obloquy typically delude for a cypher of what Lawley plans to charge. They often delude for $10 or less.

ICANN had repeatedly rejected Lawley's covering since 2000, low push from Christian groups and governments sorry with the distribute of online porn. Lawley has pitched the suffix as a way for parents to more easily country access to the content. He argues it module be easier for Web filtering software to country ".xxx" sites since they are understandably tagged as porn.

Source