Meanwhile, anti-porn campaigners such as the writer and academic Gail Dines, think .xxx is a disaster because “the only thing that can happen is that pornography will increase.” About this, and nothing else, she is in firm agreement with Stuart Lawley.
Lawley expects to make a lot of money out of .xxx. Currently, there are 7 million adult domains and if he sells half a million more, he will have revenues of US$30 million a year. His company, ICM Registry, has 158,242 pre-reservations, but he hopes to win a 50 percent market share within a couple of years. Lawley has spent almost US$10 million of his own money on the project, most of it on lawyers. About pornography itself he claims to be “neutral” and he refuses to comment on the suggestion that exploitation of vulnerable women in the industry is rife.
However, he apparently has some scruples about making a fortune out of porn, and has promised to give a substantial chunk of his money away.
“For me it was clear this would be a very lucrative business venture,” he said. “But at the same time, at the beginning of this process I was the father of a two-year-old son and we put this non-profit element in, that we have this sponsoring organization [the International Foundation for Online Responsibility] to which we donate US$10 of every registration every year, that is going to use most of those proceeds to further parental education and child protection initiatives on a global basis.”
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