As we told you they would yesterday the ICANN board made it official today and voted to approve the .XXX extension.
I spoke to ICM’s founder Stuart Lawley yesterday shortly after the vote and he told me he would expect the first .XXX domains to go live by no later than 1Q 2011.
In an article published by the AP today, Mr. Lawley is quoted as saying he expects .xxx to attract at “least 500,000 registrations”, citing the 110,000 reservations ICM has already received.
He was further quoted as saying:
“I think we could do a million or more. There are several million adult TLDs already out there”
So the question is how many .xxx registrations are you predicting that there will be after one year of full operation.
The expected retail price for a .xxx registration is $60 per year.
Please make your choice on the right and of course feel free to comment below.
They didn’t really vote to approve it. They voted to do “due diligence” and to get the advice of the GAC. The soonest they’ll vote on it again is at the December meeting in Cartagena.
It’s a nice day to be a lawyer or lobbyist, as the next 6 months are spent by both sides lobbying/fighting for and against it.
$60 per year is acceptable, anyway i prefer .XX than .XXX much more.
sex sells, expect a lot of interest in addition to a ton of “‘defensive registrations”.
I anticipate registrations will be high, namely due to companies and individuals protecting their brands.
mp/m
Mediocre at best. Despite what is bound to be a mass of both positive and negative media for the launch, I would doubt more than a handful of non-domainers will get involved.
wallace, how can you prefer .xx to .xxx? xx is meaningless, xxx means porn.
What I would like to know is pending this decision, will .com adult names become obsolete? Will it become law or mandatory that sites with adult content use a .xxx extension?
Owning a sizable adult domain collection myself, except for a select few it will be cost prohibitive to re-register all the .com’s in the .xxx extension. It almost feels as though this decision will “strong arm” or coerce certain users into ponying up more money. The repercussions will be tremendous, I anticipate many lawsuits as a result of this decision.
George
I really get the feeling this is a done deal with a very light sprinkling of due diligence to make sure nothing has fundamentally changed with the applicant.
I do not think your going to see a rehashing of the issues and the merits.
I will not Buy Any. I think its use another wastless use of space.
Can anyone say .buggywhip
.XXX was launched just in time to participate in the funeral of the online porn business.
2 years ago + they would have made a killing, now in post pornTUBE world it will not be as successful as the owners think.
100K-200K first year.
As Sin says—won’t buy it– another piece of BS just like asia/eu and blah blah blah.
Back to the basics-Dot com rules!!!
The media’s take is about what one would expect:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/06/25/xxx.domain/index.html?hpt=T2
.
I doubt it will succeed… it’s too easy to block all .xxx domains at provider level
.
The net is about to get tsunami’d with a ton of crap as .xxx and .whatever (x 500) hit the internet.
Dean
All excellent questions.
At the moment .com domains will not be replaced by .xxx domains, nor will any adult site be required to move to a .xxx extension, so for your adult .com domains its business as usual.
Now the bigger question is how much leakage will go to .xxx from .com and that is just a guess at this point.
I spent a few hours a couple of months ago with Stuart in his office in Florida and my understanding is that owning the .com, lets say in my case dirty.com does not guarantee me of owning dirty.xxx.
I will most likely have to compete with other domainers who may want dirty.xxx for example with the domain like usual going to the highest bidder.
As far as lawsuits, I’m not sure who your going to sue.
Icann granted the application for the extension, you can’t sue them and what are you going to sue the ICM registry for, doing a business they are permitted to do?
Max
Right 500+ extensions in about 2 years, making it a confusing mess assuming the root can survive.
All of the issues arising from the .xxx extension battle mostly importantly does it have the support of the adult community or any community will be irrelevant to the granting of an extension.
So to be clear if you have the support of a community it will help you get an extension without it having to go to an auction if there is another applicant seeking the same extension, but there is absolutely no requirement that an applicant show anyone wants or supports the extension.
David
Unfortunately Icann botched this up form the start, first voting for then rejecting the application.
The application could have been squashed as they say here in Europe early on without suits and threats of suits had ICANN done it in a proper fashion years ago.
Now they are stuck but their own rules to grant the application
From a social poing of view this is a bad idea, I can easily see parents lead to believe that now all sites will have a .xxx address and filtering it out they are safe, this domain name will endager children safety online.
From a domainer point of view, if anyone has paid $millions for an adult domain they will be living under fear of some conservative Government making .com/.net adult content illegal one day and burning their investment in ashes.
.xxx will have thousands of registrations due to trademark issues, but I doubt they will have any real site other than that.
Jon
A ton of defensive registrations
MHB,
thank you for shedding some light on the subject. My concerns and the reason I brought the subject of lawsuits was not necessarily against ICANN or Stuart Lawley, but rival adult industry companies that might be coveting the same name in the two different extensions.
Yes, the big companies like Bang Brothers, etc, can afford to protect their brand names by registering them in the .xxx extension, but what about the little guy’s that own several hundred names that are not developed and are not yet producing revenue with their names, yet had plans on developing them in the future? Or maybe a smaller company that has worked years and spent a lot of money to brand and create an online presence with their adult niche and name and is now outgunned or outbid by another company for the same name in the .xxx extension? Now you have two rival companies using the same name (brand).
This just makes things a hell of a lot more redundant and confusing and it seems like it’s just a strong arm technique to bleed the little guy again. I could see if the owner of an already registered given adult name was given the option to register the same name in the .xxx at a discount or at the very least a reasonable registration fee, but $60 is an outrage!
I am not that versed in intellectual property law, but someone needs to do research and look into the constitutionality of the decision to approve the .xxx extension and weather it is endorsing and encouraging intellectual property and copyright infringement.
P.S. the same laws that govern or mandate the protection of “legitimate” trademarks or businesses should also protect the adult industry.
I think we missed the G factor here, they have the capability divide and rule. All other search networks might follow what will be implemented by Goggle. I feel that Google ….some day will evolve to a search platform with ability to provide search query’s based on specific extension range or by user search prolific which are defined by the gbots. Anyway, 3 main extension will rule the global audience and .COM will be the leader. All other extension will die naturally.
Wish I’m wrong……since a lot people out there going to lose and make those registrar’s rich.
Dean
“””I brought the subject of lawsuits was not necessarily against ICANN or Stuart Lawley, but rival adult industry companies that might be coveting the same name in the two different extensions.”””
The extension is going to have to have a sunrise period for trademark holders just like any other extension, so if you have a federally registered trademark on a domain or term lets use your example of bangbrothers, trademarks will have to be honored.
“but what about the little guy’s that own several hundred names that are not developed and are not yet producing revenue with their names, yet had plans on developing them in the future? Or maybe a smaller company that has worked years and spent a lot of money to brand and create an online presence with their adult niche and name and is now outgunned or outbid by another company for the same name in the .xxx extension? Now you have two rival companies using the same name (brand).””
I feel you.
I own around 6,000 adult domains myself and with PPC revenues on adult down even more so than non-adult, justifying a cost increase of 6X is going to be tough.
This is way I said as a domainer I’ve always been against the extension.
You like alll adult domainers aree going to have to make business decisions based on your budget, your belief in how quick and how dramatic traffic will migrate to .XXX.
I’m sure there are domainers who believe .xxx will take years to make any meaningful change in users browsing habitats, however that’s just a good guess, since this is new territory and your going to have to make your own call on it.
“”I could see if the owner of an already registered given adult name was given the option to register the same name in the .xxx at a discount or at the very least a reasonable registration fee, but $60 is an outrage!”””
I talked to Stuart about giving the matching .xxx domain to the .com holder. He mentioned he might consider this, but then owners of .net and .org domains would bitch, and of course he would be leaving a lot of money on the table so auctions are likely.
So the next questions is how much will say porn.xxx sell for?
Its a good example because both porn.com and porn.net sold fairly recently, with the .net selling for 5% of the .com.
Even though its a new extension I’m sure you could make the argument that the .xxx version could very possibly also sell for 5% of the .com or around $400K-$500K.
So if you had just a few really good .com adult domains you might be forced to pay tens of thousands each just to get the matching .xxx
“The same laws that govern or mandate the protection of “legitimate” trademarks or businesses should also protect the adult industry.””
They do.
6,000 adult.com’s!? that ought to be a nice chunk of change to convert to .xxx, I guess I don’t have it so bad after all.
I hate to say it, but my gut instinct tells me that .xxx will eventually out rival .com (in adult related matter) and be the extension that is predominantly associated with porn and adult content. Oh well, you know the saying: “if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen”. Time to re-group.
🙂
Back on Terra Firma in the US.
Some observations:
1) there is no requirement to post adult entertainment on the .xxx websites, that is the registrants choice, however,
2) in order to be able to register resolving names, the registrant has to be a member of our sponsored community. Please see the draft contract for full definition
3) non members of sponsored community can apply during the start up period to effectively remove their trademarks for ever being registered for a reasonable one time fee. We believe this launch will be the most friendly to the large non adult industry IP holders. Pay a reasonable fee once and forget about it thereafter.
4) pre-reservations have gone crazy since the announcement with over 23,500 received on Friday alone, now standing at circa 135,000
5) when the community see our full range of plans for .xxx including proprietary payments systems and age verification methods with ICM as the ‘trusted clearing house” we genuinely believe that, over time, .xxx will become the PREFERRED TLD of choice for the adult industry.
Many thanks for all of your comments
as of 8.30 EST Sunday 142,626 pre-reservations reached.