As you already might have found out from our News section, ICANN, which stands for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, shocked everybody by announcing that it was dropping (at least for the time being) the .xxx domain, which they were supposed to vote for as a part of a meeting in Vancouver. This dismissal came pretty much out of nowhere, as things appeared to be going on the right track and everybody involved was supportive of the project. Moreover, the proper paperwork and reports about the feasibility of this porn domain had been presented to the approval commission end of August.

We are aware of the fact that a 350-page report can be pretty tough to swallow, but considering it was published over three months ago, it's pretty fair to say that even the laziest of the ICANN members could have made an effort and go through with the basic information presented in the feasibility papers. Still, the reason that Vint Cerf, ICANN chairman, gave for this sudden change of plans was that the commission needed more time to digest the report and under no circumstances was ICANN going to vote on this matter while in Vancouver.

The issue of having an .xxx domain remains open according to the promises made by ICANN president, Paul Twomey, who announced that he and the commission were still waiting for the recommendations of an advisory committee reviewing the proposal. This could be a good sign of a continuation of what started as a very good project which the ICANN had proposed exactly a year ago. Things seemed to follow the normal approval chain even until June, when ICANN announced it would move ahead with plans to evaluate establishing the sex-site domain, but then everything changed for the worse when in August the US Commerce Department asked for more time to hear objections. And objections followed in great numbers as religious groups and family liberties advocates soon became very active about opposing the creation of the porn domain. And all of a sudden, things didn't go so well for all the porn producers who were hoping in having a clearer identity with the new Internet addresses ending with the ".xxx" suffix.

Actually, the idea behind having a porn domain isn't a bad thing at all and this shouldn't be seen as a dream come true for all perverts and sex addicts out there. Having a virtual Red Light District with proper zip code, street numbers and nametags on each door would make it also a lot easier for those who want to filter out porn to insure they won't be bothered by this type of content. Of course, parental control could also be much more effective than it is using today's filtering options and actually the religious groups, such as the Family Research Council, who complained that creating the .xxx domain would only legitimize the porn industry, could see a different perspective on the use of a better monitored porn domain.

There are rumors about higher interventions being made in respect of delaying this approval of the .xxx domain and the target of these accusations is EU commissioner Viviane Reding, who supposedly called the head of ICANN Paul Twomey directly and threatened to withdraw all the European Union representatives unless the issue was delayed. The plot thickens even further as there are voices suggesting that behind all this sudden change of heart could be the US government, obviously trying to avoid being seen doing so because of the ongoing Internet governance conflict.

No matter who did what and why, the one obvious conclusion is that for the time being, ICM Registry, the private company that has said it could run the .xxx domain as an environment that would enable people to easily find pornography on the web, has lost millions of dollars already and it doesn't look like that for a while there's going to be any change on this matter.