US urges delay in porn domain approval

"This matter has been before ICANN for five years ... We are, to say the very least, disappointed that concerns that should have been raised and addressed weeks and months ago are being raised in the final days."

Stuart Lawley, chairman of ICM Registry Inc

Acknowledging "unprecedented" opposition, the US government has asked the Internet's key oversight agency to delay approval of a new ".xxx" domain name designed as a virtual red-light district.

Michael Gallagher, assistant secretary for communications and information at the US Commerce Department, stopped short of urging its rejection, but he called on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to "ensure the best interests of the Internet community as a whole are fully considered."

The department received nearly 6,000 letters and e-mails expressing concerns about the impact of pornography on families and children and objecting to setting aside a domain suffix for it, he said.

"The volume of correspondence opposed to creation of a .xxx TLD [domain name] is unprecedented," Gallagher wrote to Vinton Cerf, ICANN's chairman.

Gallagher said ICANN should take more time to evaluate those concerns.

Approval of the domain name had been expected as early as Tuesday, five years after it was first proposed and two months after ICANN gave it a tentative OK. Gallagher's letter was sent last week and made public on Monday.

The chairman of ICANN's Government Advisory Committee, Mohd Sharil Tarmizi, also wrote ICANN officials last week urging delay and expressing "a strong sense of discomfort" among many countries, which he did not name.

Gallagher's comments, however, carry greater weight because his agency has veto power over ICANN decisions given the US government's role in funding early developing of the Internet and selecting ICANN in 1998 to oversee domain name administration.

The matter remained on the published agenda for a private conference call among board members on Tuesday, though a delay in final approval was likely. ICANN typically does not disclose the outcome of such meetings for up to a week.

Two in five Internet users visited an adult site in April, according to tracking by comScore Media Metrix. The company said 4 percent of all Web traffic and 2 percent of all surfing time involved an adult site.

A Florida company, ICM Registry Inc, proposed ".xxx" as a mechanism for the US$12 billion online porn industry to clean up its act. All sites using ".xxx" would be required to follow yet-to-be-written "best practices" guidelines, such as prohibitions against trickery through spamming and malicious scripts.

Use of ".xxx" would be voluntary, however.

Skeptics note that porn sites are likely to keep their existing ".com" storefronts, even as they set up shop in the new ".xxx" domain name, reducing the effectiveness of any software filters set up to simply block all ".xxx" names.

Conservative groups such as the Family Research Council also expressed worries that creating a ".xxx" suffix would also legitimize pornographers.

But ICM chairman Stuart Lawley, in a response to ICANN, pointed out that the agency already offered ample opportunity to raise objections.

"This matter has been before ICANN for five years, and very actively and publicly debated for the past 18 months," he said.

"We are, to say the very least, disappointed that concerns that should have been raised and addressed weeks and months ago are being raised in the final days," Lawley said.

Nonetheless, he said he was open to a one-month delay so ICM can address the late objections.

Also on the agenda Tuesday was approval of a less controversial domain name, ".cat" for sites devoted to Catalan language and culture.

More than 260 domain name suffixes exist, mostly country codes such as ".fr" for France. Recent additions include ".eu" for the EU and ".mobi" for mobile services.