By now most of you surely know that the ICANN Board voted 9-5 in favor of scrapping the .XXX domain name proposal, ending what has been a significant threat to the adult entertainment industry for many years running now. This is just fantastic news and a great victory for the adult industry. In light of this development I would like to take a moment to share my personal experiences with this issue, to explain how this industry was almost sold out by its own people, and to offer a word of thanks to those companies and individuals who stuck up for the good of the entire adult industry and fought against the .XXX proposal.It was over two years ago when I first started paying close attention to the fact that a proposal to create a .XXX domain extension was picking up speed at ICANN. By the time I really understood the gravity of the situation, ICANN had already held a public comment period on .XXX, and most of the adult entertainment industry had been unaware that their official chance to speak up had ended. It was very unclear at that time what (if anything) could be done about .XXX as it seemed then to be very late in the game.

By the time I even started paying attention, a number of adult companies, individuals and at least one industry organization had quietly held private talks with ICM Registry, the company that was trying to make .XXX happen, and had agreed to support their .XXX domain name proposal. What they were to get in exchange for that support is anyone’s guess, but it doesn’t take a strong imagination to think up a few likely possibilities. Yet these entities were not being upfront about their support of .XXX, and instead were staying absolutely quiet about their involvement. This silence made sense to me; it was pretty apparent that .XXX was a bad idea for the adult industry at large, meaning companies that were supporting it probably didn’t want it known that they had agreed to sell the rest of the industry down the river.

Remarkably, few adult webmasters were even talking about the .XXX threat. That might have been because many webmasters thought incorrectly that the .XXX issue had already been decided. Several years ago, the Free Speech Coalition polled its membership on the issue of .XXX, and its membership declined to support it – many adult webmasters thought the FSC vote was the end of the issue. But the FSC wasn’t in a position to decide the ultimate fate of .XXX, only to decide whether the organization itself would support ICM Registry’s proposal. ICANN would have to decide to accept or reject .XXX, and for a long time it appeared that ICANN was prepared to deliver the thumbs up.

In general getting a conversation started about .XXX was like pulling teeth. Just try to start a conversation about a potential threat to the industry and there will always 10 people ready to call you “Chicken Little.” But I did find a number of allies right from the start who weren’t shy about speaking up. YNOTBob got it right away, as did LAJ and most of the YNOT staff. Bob helped me raise the issue with a few others, and between the two of us we found a number of webmasters who saw this issue as something to take seriously. Mike Hawk at SmashBucks and Dave Cummings at DaveCummings.com were against .XXX right from the start, and Brandon Shalton of Fight the Patent had already been campaigning against .XXX even before it was on my radar. In fact, Shalton was one of the few people who actually managed to issue a comment to ICANN during the original public comment period. But perhaps the biggest contributors to the .XXX fight were Tom Hymes, who is the Communications Director of the Free Speech Coalition, Reed Lee, an attorney who is also on the Board of the FSC, and Jeffrey Douglas, an attorney who is Chairman of the Board of the FSC. These people volunteered their time to help raise awareness about the .XXX threat and they deserve serious thanks for doing the right thing right from the start. Fortunately though, they weren’t the only ones who stood up and opposed .XXX before its ultimate demise, which I will get to in a moment.

What I found when approaching webmasters about .XXX is that most webmasters, when they were willing to talk about the topic, were either against .XXX, or else quickly became against .XXX once they had fully discussed the issue. Threads on YNOT, GFY, JBM, etc., generally resulted in a resounding majority of posters expressing opposition to .XXX. There were a few exceptions of course, but in general any supporters were drowned out in a sea of opposition. To me that was just the proof of what I felt all along – the adult Internet industry largely did not want a .XXX domain name, and ICANN had been mislead about the level of industry support.

It didn’t sit well with me that those companies that had behaved badly, that had sold out the industry, were on the verge of seeing a profit from their bad deeds. About a year ago, I accepted an invitation from AVN to speak on a panel at Internext Expo and debate ICM Registry’s top dogs, Stuart Lawley and Jason Hendeles, on the .XXX topic. They were still anxious to have the support of the adult industry because, after all, if their proposal cleared the ICANN hurdle then they would need adult webmasters to actually buy these domain names – and the price wasn’t going to be cheap. I suspect that they probably didn’t want any organized opposition to surface either, since any loud opposition had the potential to complicate things with ICANN. Tom Hymes was likewise invited to join the debate as an opponent to .XXX, a fact which gave me great confidence that the opposing views would be well represented. Although the debate went well, the unfortunate truth is that too few adult Webmasters showed up to witness it.

It was about this time when certain proponents of .XXX were quietly coming to me and arguing that the approval of .XXX was “inevitable” and that I should just accept it. And I have to admit, I wasn’t entirely sure that they were wrong. Especially considering that ICANN had, for all intents and purposes, already approved .XXX and was in the process of negotiating the terms of its rollout with ICM Registry. Yet it also occurred to me that arguing that something is “inevitable” is a great way to take the fight out of the opposition. I knew immediately that these “inevitable” arguments were being passed quietly to others too because they started showing up on industry message boards.

Yet .XXX was not inevitable. And this story serves as a perfect example of why one should not stop fighting for what is right just because the odds look long. Sometime after the Internext seminar, ICM Registry was thrown a huge nasty curve. The anti-pornography “family values” groups had come to believe that the .XXX proposal was some scheme of the adult entertainment industry – which isn’t surprising, given that ICM Registry had been arguing all along that they had the support of the adult industry. Fearing that .XXX was some clever way to legitimize porn and possibly get around obscenity laws, the conservative groups launched an all out assault on .XXX and asked the Bush administration to get involved. That’s when the U.S. Commerce Department, an agency that had been unwilling to listen to the pleas of the adult industry, decided to get involved – they contacted ICANN and asked it to reconsider the .XXX decision. Apparently, several thousand concerned parents, at the urging of anti-pornography groups, had written the Commerce Department with letters of opposition to .XXX domains. Oh, the irony! Several thousand letters from adult webmasters would have done nothing, but from the “moral minority” this was an entirely different thing. ICANN agreed to put the .XXX decision on hold, and suddenly the outcome was no longer “inevitable.” So really, thanks need to go out to the anti-pornography groups too – for failing to see the censorship tool that was almost in their grasp. ICANN opened up a new period for public comment on .XXX, and the industry had another shot to be heard.

And if I thought it couldn’t get any better then I was wrong. Two Democratic senators, Pryor and Baucus, introduced an initiative to create a mandatory .XXX TLD and force adult webmasters to use it. That of course only proved what .XXX opponents had been saying all along – that .XXX would be a danger to Free Speech and free commerce on the Internet. How could ICM Registry still claim that .XXX would be “voluntary” if the United States government had already lined up to use it as a tool for censorship?

By now the industry’s opposition to .XXX was also in full swing. I can say that I personally smelled blood, and felt that there really was a chance to kill this beast once and for all. The FSC had started a “letter writing campaign,” and Tom Hymes was collecting letters of opposition from FSC members. Brandon Shalton had started a “Fight the .XXX” webpage, and his list of companies and individuals who opposed .XXX was steadily growing. The FSC even dispatched a group of two industry representatives to an ICANN meeting in New Zealand where it was discovered that a lot of people there didn’t even know that the industry was largely opposed to the .XXX proposal. Then, right before the fateful ICANN meeting on May 10th, adult webmasters from all over the planet started posting their opposition to .XXX on ICANN’s website.

I am very proud to say that at the end of the day, a lot of adult webmasters stepped up and made their voice heard on .XXX. It seemed to me that there were at least 20 posts in opposition to .XXX for every 1 post in favor of .XXX. Make sure to check out the ICANN website and see for yourself who stood up and who didn’t. In addition, many of the industry’s bigger players also expressed opposition in the final days, including Hustler’s own Larry Flynt. Now I don’t know about the rest of you, but when it comes to the topic of fighting against censorship Larry Flynt comes to my mind immediately. It was a proud moment to know that Larry stood shoulder to shoulder with the rest of us who were expressing our opposition to this proposal. Companies like Wicked and Private also stepped up. Those who participated in the opposition should be very proud of what they did, and they should know that in the future they can remember that when push came to shove they were on the right side of this issue.

So what killed .XXX? Some will say it was the industry’s opposition which showed ICANN that industry support did not in fact exist for a .XXX TLD. Others will say it was the conservatives and their ironically misguided efforts to influence ICANN through the United States Department of Commerce. (Isn’t it nice to know that government is there to represent all of us? It just doesn’t always KNOW that it’s representing all of us.) Some will say that those two Democratic senators killed .XXX by trying to make it mandatory. Frankly I think all of these things played a significant role. I’m not really concerned with what killed .XXX, just that it’s dead and that so many of us stood against it. I’m also tickled that the industry people who made back door deals on .XXX failed to be rewarded for their actions; in fact, some of those people have been outed on industry message boards and have, in fact, suffered as a result of their decisions.

It would be misleading of me to end this tale without warning that the initiative proposed by senators Baucus a Pryor is still on the table. Although it seems very certain that ICANN isn’t about to approve a .XXX TLD, it is possible that the United States Government could still try to force the creation of a .XXX TLD through the United States Commerce Department. At the moment I don’t see this as a serious threat, and better yet, I feel confident that this industry now has the means to challenge .XXX should it ever be revived in Congress.

So congratulations, adult industry. Victories are few and far between, but this is definitely a big one.