Stuart Lawley from ICM Registry (.XXX) left a comment about .XXX registrant rights in the new adult gTLDs, this is worthy of being its own post. I know many have been confused with what they get as a .XXX registrant when the new .porn, .adult and .sex gTLDs become available.

Stuart explains:

Our original grandfathering plan was to release the new extensions with priority registration for the underlying matching .XXX owner who could at that point register the new names (and of course pay the registration fee for those new names) or decide to do nothing with those names and the matching .PORN names would effectively sit on the shelf, reserved at no cost for that .XXX registrant should he wish to register at a later date.

This is exactly what Verisign had planned for their IDN .com equivalents, but which isn’t something they are currently able to offer either.

Unfortunately, post submission of our application, ICANN amended and documented detailed rules about Sunrise and launch processes which contained restrictions and prohibitions on “earmarking” names. These new rules applied to all new gTLDs, including us and Verisign as well.

We submitted our Launch Plan for approval to ICANN but approval wasn’t given, citing the ICANN mandated launch rules and also citing security and stability concerns.

We also learned that registrars were not able to implement the “reserve now, register later” plan and so we are unable to offer our original grandfathering plan both from ICANN¹s policy perspective and from a registrar implementation perspective.

We have therefore amended our launch plans to comply exactly with those permitted by ICANN and that includes an exclusive 30 day period April 15-May 15, post Sunrise, but pre-General Availability that allows .XXX holders of record as of 31st March 2015 to participate in our Limited Registration period, which we refer to as our Domain Matching Program. The Domain Matching Program will allow .XXX stakeholders to register any available directly matching second level name in .PORN or .ADULT, before those names are offered to the general public.

To be clear, anyone wishing to register in this period will pay the regular registration fee charged by their Registrar (we don’t set Registrar pricing) and any names not registered during this period will be made available for general registration on the 4th of June 2015 as part of General Availability.

As Michael also pointed out the launch of .SEX is delayed a few months as a result of the contention negotiations with the other applicant and is expected to launch in the fall of 2015 but those dates and the details of that launch haven¹t as yet been finalized.

I hope these answers help.

ICANN’s Rules did not allow us to launch as previously hoped but, in our opinion, the Domain Matching Program gives the closest approximation whilst complying to the letter with the ICANN mandated processes.

Stuart Lawley””