.xxx founder Stuart Lawley has died
Stuart Lawley, who battled ICANN to launch the .xxx gTLD, has reportedly died of a heart attack aged 61.
AVN, a trade publication for the adult video industry, reported the news yesterday, citing his friend Greg Dumas.
While Lawley did not found ICM Registry, he took it over early in its fight for .xxx and ran it through its 2011 launch until its sale to MMX in 2018.
He was in charge during the protracted fight to get ICANN to approve .xxx over the objections of governments and some in the porn industry, which led to a precedent-setting Independent Review Process proceeding, which ICM won.
For the domain industry, Lawley arguably leaves two important legacies — a more accountable ICANN, and the now industry-standard concept of domain-blocking services, which ICM came up with with its “Sunrise B”.
I really liked Stu. I considered him a mate.
He was an extremely low-bullshit source, but our regular conversations back at the height of the .xxx controversy more often than not also diverged into our personal lives — everything from our love lives to our respective blood pressure scores — which doesn’t happen very often in my line of work.
Having sold his scratch-built fax machine company for $200 million in the 1990s, his life was considerably more interesting than mine. It’s because of Stu that, should the opportunity ever present itself, I know why it’s a bad idea to buy a private jet.
We hadn’t talked much since his son, Sabian, was killed by a hit-and-run driver a couple of years ago, a tragic and still-unsolved incident that caused him to retire from business.
GoDaddy’s .xxx contract renewed
GoDaddy’s .xxx gTLD will no longer be “sponsored”, following a vote of ICANN’s board of directors last week.
At its ICANN 81 AGM in Istanbul, the board approved the renewal of GoDaddy subsidiary ICM Registry’s Registry Agreement.
The new deal closely follows the text of the standard RA most other gTLDs use, scrapping restrictions that GoDaddy found onerous but which were vital in getting the deal approved in the first place back in 2011.
It means the end of IFFOR, the International Foundation For Online Responsibility, the largely toothless oversight body that had been tasked with creating policies and issuing grants to worth causes but arguably did neither.
It also means less friction for the .xxx registration process, as registrants will no longer have to affirm they are members of the “sponsored community”, which never existed in any real sense anyway.
Some elements of the original sponsorship agreement, such as strict prohibitions on child sexual abuse material and the suggestion thereof, have been moved to Public Interest Commitments that ICANN could in theory enforce.
In its resolution text, ICANN noted that the Governmental Advisory Committee, which almost got .xxx killed off a couple decades ago, had not felt strongly enough about the new deal to publicly comment on it one way or the other.
.xxx makes most of its money from defensive registrations. It had almost 45,000 domains under management at the end of June, but barely 7,000 of those appeared in its zone file of the same date. That does not included domains blocked via the AdultBlock and GlobalBlock services, which are not counted in any public document but which I estimate are measured in five figures.
As customers flee legacy gTLDs, .org tops 11 million names
Almost every legacy gTLD is shrinking, but .org is thriving and recently hit a major milestone.
Public Interest Registry announced yesterday that it’s passed the 11 million registered names milestone, with CEO Jon Nevett calling it “a big moment for our organization”.
Looking at zone file records, it appears that the 11 million mark was passed some time last month. It’s added about 240,000 domains to its zone since the start of 2024.
The same records show that almost all legacy, pre-2012 gTLDs are shrinking, some by alarming numbers.
It will not be news to regular readers that .com and .net volumes have been suffering recently, with .com down about 3.4 million names since the start of the year and .net down about 477,000.
In percentage terms, .pro is by far the biggest loser over the same period. It started the year with 718,000 names in its zone and has just 484,000 today, losing about a third of its domains.
The larger legacies — .info, .biz, .asia and .mobi — have all gone down by tens of thousands. Meanwhile, the smaller gTLDs .name, .tel, .coop, .museum and .aero all suffered losses commensurate with their size.
It’s not really fair to judge .xxx by the size of its zone, as GoDaddy Registry mainly sells .xxx as defensive registrations that never see the zone, but it’s also down this year.
The only other legacy gTLDs that have grown this year are .jobs, .cat and .travel, which have all experienced modest growth measured in the hundreds of domains.
The lack of a profit motive is likely behind PIR’s success.
Despite having price caps removed from its ICANN contract and experiencing the same inflationary pressures as the rest of us, it has declined to increase its renewal fees, unlike the other legacy gTLDs with large customer bases.
GoDaddy likely to win relaxed .xxx deal
GoDaddy seems set to get a renewed and relaxed .xxx registry contract, after ICANN dismissed the concerns of critics of the deal.
In a much-delayed analysis of submissions to a recent public comment period, Org indicated that it is in favor of GoDaddy, via subsidiary ICM Registry, migrating to a Registry Agreement much more in line with sister gTLDs .porn, .adult and .sex.
That would mean an end to the “sponsored” status of .xxx, removing the largely pointless restrictions and streamlining the registration process, and the dissolution of IFFOR, the nominal sponsor, which was criticized by one commenter as a toothless “gravy train”.
Only nine comments were received, and views were mixed, but where commenters were critical of the proposed deal ICANN has stood firm.
Notably, Org dismissed the idea that a public comment period on a Registry Agreement renewal is an appropriate forum to question whether a signatory to that Registry Agreement has historically complied with its terms.
At least two commenters had raised issues, some of which I have reported, about whether ICM had stuck to promises related to funding IFFOR and whether IFFOR had stuck to promises to issue cash grants to worthy causes.
Commenters also said that ICM has already stopped verifying the identities of registrants in its made-up “sponsored community”, which would have enabled it to more easily tackle repeatedly abusive registrants.
But ICANN doesn’t think that kind of thing — which it files under “Misconceptions, assumptions, and allegations and claims” — is suitable for discussion in Public Comments.
“If there are concerns regarding ICM’s compliance with the .XXX RA, such concerns (if any) should be raised with ICANN Compliance for investigation and are considered outside of the scope of this Public Comment proceeding,” the analysis reads.
There’s also no need to replace ICM’s sponsorship commitments with Public Interest Commitments along the lines of those found in most post-2012 gTLDs, according to the Org analysis.
“ICANN has not identified a need to add further, new obligations for the operation of .XXX or to treat .XXX differently than other adult-themed gTLDs, particularly in light of the similar PICs that the .ADULT, .PORN, and .SEX gTLDs have utilized for approximately the last decade,” it reads.
The .xxx agreement was due to expire in early 2021, but its term has been repeatedly extended as negotiations continued behind the scenes. Likewise, the public comment analysis was originally due to be published in late May but was repeatedly delayed.
It’s now up to ICANN’s board of directors, which has already been briefed on the analysis contents, to approve the renegotiated deal.
GoDaddy getting a free pass from porn jail?
ICANN has shirked its compliance duties and is handing GoDaddy a “Get Out of Jail Free” card with proposed changes to their .xxx registry agreement, according to critics.
A recently closed public comment period saw a mixed response from the community on whether GoDaddy should be allowed to throw out inconvenient and costly terms of its 10-year-old registry contract and operate .xxx more of less like any other open gTLD.
While the deal’s chief critic, consultant and former ICANN director Michael Palage, has made a detailed case explaining why he thinks the amendments should not go ahead, other commenters agree with GoDaddy that some of its stricter registration policies are no longer needed.
Tucows said that the current .xxx rules, which require registrants to verify their identities, are “cumbersome or non-transparent”, not only adding unnecessary friction to the registration path but also amounting to the “surveillance of sex workers”.
Palage managed to persuade the At-Large Advisory Committee to submit its own comments, in which ALAC claims that GoDaddy has already “walked away” from three important contractual commitments on registrant verification and abuse reporting “unilaterally and without consequence from ICANN Contractual Compliance”.
According to Palage, when GoDaddy acquired ICM Registry from MMX a few years ago it unilaterally decided to stop verifying the identities of its registrants and did away with the unique community membership IDs that enabled it to deactivate a registrant’s entire portfolio if it was found to be in breach of the rules by, for example, publishing child sexual abuse material.
ICM also stopped donating $10 for every registration to its oversight body, IFFOR, which in turn spent the money it did receive on director salaries rather than making cash grants to child protection causes, Palage says. I’ve previously gone into some depth on this.
“I am concerned that instead of ICANN compliance holding ICM Registry accountable to these representations, they’re essentially giving them a get out of jail card free and potentially removing the ability for third parties to hold ICM Registry accountable to those representations,” Palage said during a March presentation to the ALAC.
His draft comments for the ALAC were subsequently submitted under his own name; ALAC submitted a shorter, somewhat watered down version drafted by chair Jonathan Zuck.
But ALAC and Palage are in agreement that GoDaddy should have gone through the usual Registry Services Evaluation Process if it wanted to change the terms of its contract, and that the proposed amendments set a terrible precedent. ALAC wrote:
ALAC believes that commitments made in order to operate a TLD by a Registry Operator should be enforceable, subsequently implemented by the Registry Operator, and enforced by ICANN Contractual Compliance… The ALAC is concerned that the removal of commitments, through a contract renewal, could set a precarious precedent for non-compliance without repercussion for existing Registry Operators
The Business Constituency echoed ALAC’s concerns in its own comments, as did registry operator CORE Association.
Comments in favor of the .xxx amendments came from two veteran, dissenting voices from the At-Large community, Evan Leibovitch and Carlton Samuels. They said removing the extra requirements from the .xxx contract would reduce confusion and were worthless anyway:
Given the benefit of hindsight, the “Sponsored gTLD” program and designation have not on the whole provided any significant benefit to the Internet-using public. As such, we welcome the removal of this designation — and any associated extra contract requirements — from all applicable Registry Agreements going forward.
Tucows’ support for the amendments are based largely on what a pain in the neck it can be — for registrant and registrar — to register a .xxx domain. Its comments explain:
Currently, to register a .xxx domain, one must become a member of the Sponsored Community, which involves a separate application process to verify eligibility. This extra step is a barrier for those looking to quickly secure a domain. Additionally, the domain cannot resolve—meaning it cannot be used to host a website—without a valid Membership ID, which is only issued after this verification process… This activation involves additional interactions between the registry, the registrant, and the registrar. Additional steps in the registration process can be a significant deterrent as they introduce complexity and time delays.
I’m not really buying the “surveillance of sex workers” claim. Porn producers in many jurisdictions, including the US, already routinely verify the identities of their performers, and keep copies of their identity documents on file, as a legal requirement to ensure their employees are not underage.
ICANN is due to publish its summary of the public comment period by May 20.
How ICANN handles the renewal of and amendments to the .xxx contract will be interesting to watch. Will the Governmental Advisory Committee get a chance to weigh in before the deal is signed? Will the board pass a resolution, or will we see a repeat of the .org renewal debacle?
GoDaddy’s next .xxx contract may not be a done deal
ICANN has published what could be the next version of GoDaddy’s .xxx registry contract, and is framing it as very much open to challenge.
The proposed Registry Agreement would scrap the “sponsored” designation from .xxx, substantially reduce GoDaddy’s ICANN fees, and implement the strictest child-protection measures of any gTLD, as well as make ICANN Compliance’s job a lot easier by standardizing terms on the new gTLD program’s Base RA.
But, as eager as ICANN usually is to shift legacy, pre-2012 gTLDs to the Base RA, this time it’s published the contract for public comment as if it’s something GoDaddy is unilaterally proposing.
It’s “ICM’s proposal”, according to ICANN’s public comment announcement, referring to GoDaddy subsidiary ICM Registry, and “ICM has requested to use the Base Registry Agreement form, as well as to remove the sponsorship designation of the .XXX TLD”.
This is not the language ICANN usually uses when it publishes RA renewals for public comment. Normally, the proposed contracts are presented as the result of bilateral negotiations. In this case, ICANN and ICM have been in renewal discussions for at least three years, but the contract is being presented as something GoDaddy alone has asked for.
The new RA would remove almost all references to sponsorship and to IFFOR, the pretty much toothless “sponsor” organization ICM created to get its .xxx application over the line under the rules of the Sponsored TLD application round that kicked off back in 2003.
Instead, it loads a bunch of Public Interest Commitments, aimed at replicating some of the safeguards IFFOR oversight was supposed to provide, into the Base RA.
GoDaddy would have to ban and proactively seek out and report child sexual abuse material. It would also prohibit practices that suggest the presence of CSAM, such as the inclusion of certain unspecified keywords in .xxx domains or in the corresponding web site’s content or meta-content.
(ICANN notes that these PICs may become unenforceable, depending on the outcome of current discussions about its ability to enforce content-related terms of its contracts).
GoDaddy and IFFOR have both submitted letters arguing that sponsorship is no longer required. The existence of sister gTLDs .adult, .sex, and .porn as unsponsored gTLDs, also in the GoDaddy Registry stable, proves the extra oversight is not needed, they say. Registrants polled do not object to the changes, they say.
GoDaddy’s cost structure would also change under the new deal. Not only would it save $100,000 a year by cutting off IFFOR, but it would also inherit the Base RA’s 50,000-domain threshold for paying ICANN transaction fees.
This likely means it won’t pay the $0.25 transaction fee for a while — .xxx was at about 47,500 domains under management and shrinking at the last count. It hasn’t reported DUM over 50,000 since January 2023.
While the renewal terms may seem pragmatic and not especially unreasonable, they’ve already received at least one public objection.
Consultant Michael Palage, who was on the ICANN board for the first three years of .xxx’s agonizing eight-year path to approval, took to the mic at the ICANN 79 Public Forum earlier this month to urge the board to reject GoDaddy’s request.
Palage said there have been “material violations of the Registry Agreement” that he planned to inform ICANN Compliance about. He added that approving the new deal would set a bad precedent for all the other “community” registries ICANN has contracts with.
The situation has some things in common with the controversy over the proposed acquisition of Public Internet Registry and .org a few years ago, in that the proposal entails ignoring promises made by a registry two decades ago.
Whether .xxx will attract the same level of outrage is debatable — this deal doesn’t involve nearly as many domains and does not talk to the price registrants pay — but it could attract noise from those who believe ICANN should not throw out its principles for the sake of a quieter life.
One place we might look for comment is the Governmental Advisory Committee, which was the biggest reason .xxx took so long to get approved in the first place.
But the timing of the comment period opening is interesting, coming a week after ICANN 79 closed. It will end April 29, about six weeks before the full GAC next meets en masse, at ICANN 80.
It’s not impossible that the new contract could be approved and signed before the governments get a chance to publicly haul ICANN’s board over the coals.
GoDaddy wants to cut the bullshit from .xxx
GoDaddy Registry wants to drop a big chunk of nonsense from the contract governing its .xxx domain, some 20 years after it was applied for as a “Sponsored” gTLD.
It’s asked ICANN if it can kill off its sponsor, the International Foundation For Online Responsibility, and sign up to something closer to the Base New gTLD Registry Agreement, the contract that all new gTLDs from the 2012 application round are on.
GoDaddy’s .porn, .adult and .sex gTLDs have been on a non-sponsored contract for a decade to no complaint, though they haven’t sold nearly as many domains as .xxx.
IFFOR’s board, the IFFOR Ombudsman, and .xxx registrants polled by GoDaddy all agree that the “sponsored” classification is no longer needed, GoDaddy VP Nicolai Bezsonoff told ICANN VP Russ Weinstein (pdf).
The registry wants ICANN to put out a non-sponsored version of the .xxx contract out for public comment.
It looks like a fait accompli. GoDaddy and ICANN have been negotiating the renewal of the .xxx contract, which was due to expire in 2021, for at least three years. It’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which the two parties have not already agreed terms.
Nobody who doesn’t get paid by IFFOR will miss IFFOR. For 20 years it’s been the domain industry’s least-convincing merkin, existing entirely to give original .xxx manager ICM Registry (and then MMX, then GoDaddy, following industry consolidation) the illusion that it had community support for selling porn domains.
ICM created IFFOR when it applied for .xxx in 2003 during ICANN’s well-intentioned but poorly considered and ill-fated “sponsored TLD” round, where applicants had to show they had support from a community related to their chosen string.
Because the porn industry, particularly in the US, hated the idea of a .xxx domain — erroneously believing governments would force all porn sites into it and then shut it down — ICM was forced to pull a community out of its backside. And thence IFFOR was born.
IFFOR was designed to be a mini-ICANN. It was to have a board, policy-making committees, an ombudsman, oversight, transparency, etc. Its foundational documents (pdf), list 14 obligations, most of which were never fulfilled to any meaningful extent.
Judging by its web site, it’s never made a single policy since it was formed in 2011. But we can’t be sure, because the web site has been poorly maintained (a breach of the first of its original 14 commitments), with no board minutes published for the last six years (despite employing a full-time staffer on a $60,000 salary who, tax forms say, works 40 hours a week).
It did come up with something called a “Policy Engine” for new gTLD registries around the time of the 2012 round, but discontinued it a year later when nobody wanted it.
IFFOR, a not-for-profit registered in California, was supposed to receive $10 from ICM for every registered, resolving .xxx domain and use a portion of that to issue grants to worthy causes related to its mission — child protection, free speech, and so on.
While IFFOR did announce two $5,000 awards in 2013, its tax filings have not reported a single penny spent on grants since 2011. Nada.
IFFOR’s charter seems to have been renegotiated behind the scenes at some point, when .xxx turned out to not be quite the internet cash machine its founders had hoped for. From 2011 to 2014 it was rolling in cash — getting over $1 million from ICM in 2013 — but from 2016 it’s been receiving a flat $100,000 a year, most of which is spent on director salaries.
At around the same time, instead of issuing cash grants, IFFOR started producing an “educational program” for UK schools called AtFirstSite. Aimed at 11 to 14-year-olds, it covers topics such as sexting, dick pics and online pornography, with a clear emphasis on keeping young teens safe online.
AtFirstSite carried a price tag of £150, but the revenue lines on tax forms since 2016 suggest none were ever sold. Instead, the program was given for free to schools that asked for it and this was called a “grant”, to satisfy IFFOR’s grant-giving mandate.
The program — which consists of a PDF and a PowerPoint presentation — is now free, and can be downloaded here , if you want to bemuse an 11-year-old with a reference to Rihanna and Chris Brown’s destructive relationship, which ended before they were born.
Closing IFFOR is not going to cause anyone to lose any sleep, but it will nevertheless be interesting to see whether anyone objects to .xxx losing its “sponsored TLD” status when ICANN opens the contract to public comment.
Verisign: 1.7 million domain industry growth in Q2
The DNS grew by 1.7 million domains in the second quarter, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.
The quarter ended with 356.6 million domains across “all” TLDs, the company said. That’s up 1.7 million on the quarter and 4.3 million on the year.
I put “all” in quotes because it turns out Verisign hasn’t been including over a dozen TLDs in its calculations in previous reports.
Inexplicably, it hasn’t been counting 10 pre-2012 gTLDs — .aero, .asia, .cat, .coop, .gov, .museum, .pro, .tel, .travel and .xxx — for which zone files have been readily available for years. It’s also added six small ccTLDs to its calculations.
The upshot of this is that while a comparison with the Q1 DNIB would suggest growth of 2.6 million domains, it’s not, it’s just 1.7 million.
The report shows that both .com and .net shrunk in the quarter — 161.3 million versus 161.6 million and 13.1 million versus 13.2 million.
New gTLDs and ccTLDs were left to pick up the slack. Total ccTLD names was up 1.1 million to 137 million and total new gTLD domains was up 0.8 million to 28.1 million.
McCarthy wins Nominet director election
Kieren McCarthy, the former reporter who has spent much of his career bashing .uk registry Nominet in the pages of The Register, has been elected to its board of directors following a sometimes fractious campaign.
He won despite placing second to lawyer Jim Davies in the first round of voting, which saw CentralNic lawyer Volker Greimann eliminated. The vast majority of Greimann’s votes transferred to McCarthy in the second round. The results can be found here (pdf).
Turnout was a miserable 15.1%, almost 10 percentage points lower than it was in last year’s non-executive director election.
McCarthy is executive director of the International Foundation For Online Responsibility, the non-profit set up by .xxx registry ICM to hack around ICANN’s rules and give the illusion of legitimacy in the 2003 “sponsored” gTLD application round.
As such, he’s paid indirectly by GoDaddy, ICM’s current owner, which can’t have hurt his prospects in the election but GoDaddy says it did not vote in the election. Under Nominet’s controversial voting system, larger registrars get more votes, capped at 3% of the total.
With McCarthy standing on a platform of increased transparency, some Nominet members had pointed out the irony that IFFOR hadn’t published any board minutes in several years. He also faced criticism for using Nominet’s logo, apparently without permission, in his election mailshots.
McCarthy replaces Anne Taylor, whose three-year term is up.
GoDaddy shutters Twitter accounts after MMX deal
GoDaddy is closing down a bunch of Twitter accounts it acquired when it bought MMX last year.
The company this morning notified followers of 13 TLD-specific feeds that it will no longer post updates and that they should subscribe to @GoDaddyRegistry instead.
We will no longer be posting to this account. To all our followers, we hope you’ve found this channel helpful.
To stay informed about alternate domain extensions we will be posting related content @GoDaddyRegistry.
We can’t wait to see you there. pic.twitter.com/EBn9Nxwcjg
— .vodka (@DotVodka) August 18, 2022
Accounts such as @GetDotFishing, @JoinDotYoga and @DotWorkDomains were affected. They hadn’t posted much in a couple of years.
GoDaddy last year acquired MMX’s portfolio of .law, .abogado (“lawyer” in Spanish), .beer, .casa (“home” in Spanish), .cooking, .dds (“dentists” in American), .fashion, .fishing, .fit, .garden, .horse, .luxe, .rodeo, .surf, .vip, .vodka, .wedding, .work, .yoga, .xxx, .porn, .adult and .sex gTLDs.
Not ever gTLD had its own Twitter account.
The deal was worth about $120 million and led to MMX winding down earlier this year.
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