So it seems that the xxx domain will see the light of day after all, after ICANN approved the creation of the controversial domain, to be run by the ICM Registry.

ICM claims to have received more than 110,000 pre-reservations for .xxx domains from those in the industry.

The domain – which nope to be up and running next year - will be voluntary, so adult website operators that already have a dot com address, for example, would not be obliged to give up their current sites; hence Playboy could keep operating from playboy.com.

It will not be a surprise to see the first pieces of legislation making it mandatory for adult sites to move to a .XXX domain, hitting the floors of Congress in the next few months. However, even if any of them made it onto the statute books it would relate only to US hosted sites.

There are over 200 countries in the world, each with its own laws and views on what would constitute material that should be in an .XXX domain — the age at which nude modelling is allowed, or not, for example, differs substantially across the world. If it leads the way on this, the US may be viewed as trying to impose its standards on the rest of the world.

Also creating an online ‘red light’ district, an adult ghetto, by segregating adult sites, would prompt freedom of speech issues in the US if the government tried to force site operators into the domain space.

More importantly, if the .XXX domain became anything other than voluntary it would need to be policed – one of the main fears ICANN had when it turned down the proposal before. This would mean that some authority, governmental, international, or an organisation such as ICANN, would have to monitor sites to make sure that all adult sites were in that domain and that all the content was correctly labelled. Inevitably, there would be questions as to whether there should be a global code of practice, along with the penalties for failure to catagorise content correctly.

There is no doubt that the possibility of being able to block access to all sites in the .XXX domain via filtering software would certainly be one that would appeal to most parents. It would also probably have the backing of most of the adult entertainment industry since they are generally not trying to market to a customer base that can’t buy their wares. However, the ease with which .XXX addresses could be filtered would be a big concern for the industry. The switching computers that make up the backbone of the Internet are privately owned, so what would stop the owners of this infrastructure deciding to block access to all .XXX addresses through their switches? Unlikely, yes, but another concern none the less.

Despite all this we should no lose site of the true purpose of the xxx domain – to make money for the ICM Registry. ICM is proposing a cost of $60-$75 for each .XXX domain name, and when you know that you are going to be getting thousands of non porn business from Nike to Apple to Google buying up their respective xxx domains to protect their brands, you can see that ICM is set to make a lot of money from this. Don’t be fooled into thinking it is about anything other than this.

I have said before on many occasion that the creation of addition global top level domains does little more that provide a licence to print money for the registry owners. This will be no different.