• by Mark Naples , December 9, 2005

I doubt I have been the only one following industry coverage of the annual meeting the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) held this past weekend in Vancouver, B.C. ICANN Chairman Vint Cerf took up several topics related to the global administration of the Internet, some of which have become heated because the U.S. has insisted on Web oversight remaining based in the U.S. This is such a non-issue. But, it's pretty fashionable outside of the U.S. to question American motives these days.

One topic was new domains. The new .asia domain would supplement suffixes available for individual countries, such as .cn for China and .jp for Japan. ICANN earlier approved .eu for the European Union; registrations for that began this week.

However, for better or worse, what's generated the most attention has been ICANN's consideration of a new domain for porn, the xxx domain. Why ICANN would create a new, separate domain class for porn without somehow restricting the existing sites' availability on .com is beyond me.

Many of the industry's most respected journalists have flayed ICANN in the press this week for tabling this decision until next year, despite the fact that all .xxx would do is create a new place for porn sites, and probably expand the business. One such critic called .xx the "ghetto-ization" of porn, and he predicted that it would enhance the Web for the rest of us.

Of course, this implies that all the fine, upstanding porn sites now on .com will voluntarily just move their domains to .xxx. I'm confident they'd do so immediately. And, if you believe that one... I hope that ICANN will find a way to migrate these sites, if only because of where porn sits on .com now, in terms of ratios.

What ratios? Depending on whose data you believe, porn consumes anywhere from 20 percent to 40 percent of all bandwidth and traffic online. Porn sites get more than three times the traffic that the major search engines garner, and generate about one-quarter as much revenue as what we've called "Internet advertising" among reputable sites. It's a big industry, with perhaps 40 percent of U.S, users visiting these sites "once a month," (sic) according to one study, and about 20 percent of us as regular visitors to porn sites, a figure that has seemed constant since a 2001 Forrester report claimed 19 percent of North American users are regular visitors to adult content sites. Of that 19 percent, approximately one in four are women, 46 percent are married and 33 percent have children.

Has anyone seen any change in these numbers in recent years? Wouldn't a forced migration to .xxx make sense for the web? I'd like to hear from you on this one. Writing about the First Amendment last week got me thinking about the issue of porn sites from that perspective, along with the ICANN meeting's coverage of the matter.

ICANN's president, Paul Twomey, said the delay in a .xxx decision was largely procedural, and that ICANN simply needed more time to review its documents. I'll bet that the proposed technical rules in .xxx could stick in 2006, though. I think it would help further stratify our media in ways that would benefit our industry.

Perhaps a larger problem with our backbone regulatory body is the dispute regarding the relationship between ICANN and VeriSign Inc. As you may know, VeriSign manages the main database for the .com and .net slices of the Internet. Under a proposed contract renewal with ICANN, VeriSign could raise prices for .com names by 7 percent each year starting in 2007. This would be great news for VeriSign, a bounty of $17 million for it in the first year alone, assuming flat growth in the business otherwise. The deal also would increase a separate per-name fee to fund ICANN's operations. With the cost of business going up all over, why not here too, hmm? All other registration elements have come so far down in price. I think that this increase is well-warranted.

Unfortunately, two lawsuits have been filed attacking the relationship between VeriSign and ICANN, accusing them of price-fixing and other anticompetitive practices. Think about it, though--ICANN and VeriSign have been doing a pretty great job, especially when you consider how we take their protocols for granted. For one thing, there have been no major outages in its seven years as essentially our chief regulators. And even those of you reading this who had no idea what ICANN was until seeing this article, could testify that taking something like that for granted must have pretty favorable implications. I'd love to see them and VeriSign get through this, and work toward a strategy that could distance some of the Web's less desirable content providers from the rest of us.