ICANN spokesman Jason Keenan told XBIZ that Monday’s news report on Australia’s ITNews website claiming .XXX was rejected for a third time was bogus. He said the news posting was simply the case of a journalist not doing his homework.
“Apparently one of the reporters saw old footage from a BBC video and wrote a story about the defeat of .XXX,” Keenan said. “As we all know, that was last year’s news.”
ICM Registry’s proposal was shot down 9-5 last March in Lisbon as the Internet policy-making board put the brakes on a virtual red light district. ICANN rejected .XXX proposals also in 2004 and 2006.
Jupiter, Fla.-based ICM Registry set out to demonstrate the support of the sponsored community by stating 76,723 .XXX adult website were pre-reserved. It also claimed that 1,217 adult webmasters from more than 70 countries registered on ICM’s site saying that they supported .XXX and wished to register a name.
It pledged to donate $10 of the proposed annual fee of $60 for a .XXX domain name to child-protection groups and to require users of .XXX to label their content.
Debates, including one at last year’s XBIZ Hollywood Conference that focused on the measure, were heated, with the majority in the online adult community firmly opposed to it.
Efforts to reach ITNews editors on the matter went unsuccessful Tuesday, but ICM Registry President Stuart Lawley said he too was perplexed by Monday’s report, which was picked up by other news sites and numerous blogs.
“Bizarre,” Lawley told XBIZ “I think the doxy Australian journalist was reporting on last year's news.”
ICANN’s Keenan said that so far there have been no efforts to resurrect .XXX.
“It’s pretty much dead,” he said.