Christians try new strategy in anti-.xxx campaign

(UPDATED) Anti-porn protesters have changed tack in their campaign to get ICANN to kill the .xxx top-level domain.
The followers of crusading PornHarms.com founder Pat Trueman are currently lobbying ICANN’s public comment forums with messages that make them look a little like the pornographers themselves:

The .XXX sponsor, ICM, never satisfied the sponsorship requirements and criteria for a sponsored Top Level Domain. The ICANN Board denied ICM’s application for the .XXX sTLD on the merits in an open and transparent forum.

The copy-paste letter paraphrases text from ICANN’s process options report in much the same way as the pro-porn Free Speech Coalition’s Diane Duke did.
Trueman’s previous effort centered on the charge that pornography is intrinsically harmful, a subject well outside ICANN’s remit.
The fact that the new campaign is orchestrated by Trueman is revealed by Trueman himself and this comment from a supporter.
So… a vehemently anti-porn group is demanding ICANN rejects .xxx on the basis that it is not supported by the porn industry?
You’ve got to admire the chutzpah.
UPDATE: Another Christian group, the American Family Association, has opened the anti-.xxx floodgates, adding hundreds of new comments to ICANN’s forums in the last couple of hours.
The American Family Association is an unabashed “champion of Christian activism” whose mantra is “We believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.”
Not really the kind of people you’d want to be stuck in an elevator with, never mind dictating internet policy.

ICM launches .xxx letter-writing campaign

ICM Registry looks like it has taken a leaf from its opponents’ playbook, and is encouraging supporters of the proposed .xxx top-level domain to send form letters to ICANN.
The company has revamped its web site this week, to make it look a little less 2005, and part of the revamp is this page, which allows users to quickly send emails supporting the TLD to ICANN’s public comment forum, which ends May 10.
The letter addresses the substantial concerns of the comment period — namely, how ICANN should process the .xxx application in the light of February’s IRP decision, which says ICANN was wrong to reject .xxx in 2007.
In recent weeks, Christian groups and the pro-porn Free Speech Coalition have organized campaigns aimed at protesting .xxx. Both campaigns have resulted in large numbers of emails flooding ICANN.
The Christian letters are way off-topic, basically just anti-porn rants.
While the FSC letters do address ICANN’s question, they largely challenge the idea that .xxx has community support. This may end up not being a consideration for the Board.
By contrast, ICM’s letters go directly to ICANN’s core mantras of accountability and equality.
Its letter says: “Picking and choosing elements of the Panel’s declaration, or adding unnecessary procedural steps in adopting the review’s findings, would be a clear sign to the global Internet community that the organization cannot be relied upon to do its job fairly and objectively.”
The new ICM web site does, however, bear the new slogan “It’s time for adult websites to self label”.
It seems to me that this could be quite easily interpreted as a call for all adult web sites to use .xxx, which I’m pretty sure is not ICM’s intention.

Porn group starts anti-XXX campaign

Now that the Christians appear to have quietened down, the adult entertainment industry has unleashed its own letter-writing campaign aimed at crippling ICM Registry’s bid for the .xxx TLD.
The Free Speech Coalition has started urging its members to lobby ICANN with emails demanding that the .xxx proposal is rejected.
The front page of its web site started carrying the call to action earlier today, already resulting in over a dozen form complaints.
The anti-porn complaints that have flooded ICANN’s forums for the last week focussed largely on the alleged harmful effects of porn, and will probably be politely ignored.
But unlike the Christians, the FSC has read the background documents – which request comments on how ICANN should process ICM’s application – and its letters are therefore on-topic
They urge ICANN to “Adopt Option #3” by agreeing with the dissenting minority view of the Independent Review Panel that recently ruled ICANN was unfair to reject ICM back in 2007.
“Regardless of the option chosen, I ask that ICANN continue to consider the widespread opposition of the sponsored community in any further decisions concerning a .XXX sTLD,” the letters add.
The campaign is not unexpected, but it won’t make ICANN’s board of directors’ decision any easier. After all, .xxx is ostensibly a “sponsored” TLD, and a significant voice within its potential customer base does not appear to want it.
There may also be other power games at play.
ICM president Stuart Lawley claimed during his IRP cross-examination in September that the FSC had offered to support ICM in 2003, but only if it could control the sponsoring organization and collect the associated $10 per domain per year.
The ICANN comment period runs until May 10. The FSC’s own comments, from boss Diane Duke, are here.

Pornographers still hate .xxx

The Free Speech Coalition, a trade group for the porn industry, has condemned the proposed .xxx top-level domain as “untenable” and “detrimental”.
In a letter to ICANN, FSC executive director Diane Duke challenged ICANN’s board to “settle the issue once and for all by going to the actual community to test the application’s true level of support”.
The FSC is concerned that the introduction of .xxx, as proposed and pursued by ICM Registry for the last 10 years, will inevitably lead to government regulation of the online porn industry.
Duke wrote: “a proposal for a ‘Sponsored’ top-level domain by a company that is not of the industry, with the added intent to ‘regulate’ an industry it knows nothing about, is simply untenable”.
The FSC has an even bigger problem with IFFOR, the International Foundation for Online Responsibility, the group set up by ICM to act as its sponsoring organisation
IFFOR – a bit of a hack to get around the fact that ICM was essentially applying for a gTLD during a “sponsored” TLD round – was loosely modelled on ICANN’s own bottoms-up structure, with four supporting organisations creating policy for .xxx domains.
Judging by this flowchart, which is open to interpretation, the adult industry would control less than half the votes.
“Our resolute position is that no self-respecting industry would ever agree to have a minority voice on a board tasked with setting critical policies for its members,” Duke wrote.
While ICANN ultimately rejected .xxx due to the lack of community support, ICM did manage to get some support from other areas of the adult community back in 2005.
ICANN was found at fault when it rejected .xxx. The question now is whether ICANN decides to stand by its first decision, to approve .xxx, or its second, to reject it.
Bottom line: It can’t win either way.