YouPorn says ICANN not immune from .xxx antitrust

YouPorn owner Manwin Licensing has rejected ICANN’s claim to be immune from antitrust liability.
The company has told a California court that its lawsuit against ICANN and .xxx operator ICM Registry is little different from the landmark case Coalition For ICANN Transparency v Verisign.
Manwin sued ICANN and ICM last November, claiming the two illegally colluded to create a monopoly that, among other things, extorted defensive registration money from porn companies.
But ICANN has said in its attempts to have the case dismissed that the antitrust claims could not apply to it as, for one reason, it “does not engage in trade or commerce”.
Manwin’s oppositions to ICANN’s and ICM’s motions to dismiss rely heavily on the fact that the court allowed CFIT v Verisign, which challenged Verisign’s 2006 .com registry agreement, to go ahead.
Essentially, ICANN is trying to wriggle out of the suit on legal grounds at an early stage, but Manwin reckons there’s precedent for it to have to answer to antitrust claims.
You can read Manwin’s latest court filings here and here.
The case continues.

How to make $10,000 from .xxx domains

The policy body overseeing .xxx domain names plans to dish out grants of up to $10,000 to worthy causes.
The International Foundation For Online Responsibility expects to launch a new IFFOR Grants Program on June 1, according to a March announcement I only just noticed.
According to IFFOR, the grants will be capped at $10,000 per individual or organization and will be given to those who contribute to IFFOR’s four official policy goals:

Fostering communication between the Sponsored Community and other Internet stakeholders
Protecting free expression rights as defined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights
Promoting the development and adoption of responsible business practices designed to combat online child abuse images and to support user choice and parental control regarding access to online adult entertainment, and
Protecting the privacy, security, and consumer rights of consenting adult consumers of online adult entertainment goods and services

It seems like a pretty good opportunity for free speech advocacy groups to top up their funding.
ICM Registry, the .xxx manager, gives IFFOR $10 per year for every resolving .xxx domain name registered.
Its funding is therefore very likely approaching the $1.5 million mark in the hundreds of thousands of dollars right about now.

Is .xxx really that crappy?

It’s not a huge secret that the new .xxx gTLD isn’t doing as well, five months after launch, as ICM Registry would have hoped, but how does it shape up against other top-level domains?
Domain Name News earlier this week published an analysis of the top one million most-trafficked web sites, according to Alexa rankings, and found that .xxx had just 61 entries.
Per DNN reporter Mike Cohen:

We would not have thought that only 61 domains in total would be ranking inside the top 1,000,000 most visited sites in the world. That number was suppose to be exponentially higher by all accounts even a few month’s in, which we now are well into 2012, however reality says otherwise.

I’m not sure what “all accounts” DNN is referring to — possibly ICM’s marketing hype — but I thought the analysis was interesting so I thought I’d try to replicate it.
This morning I parsed today’s Alexa top million sites list and came up with the following (sortable) table.
[table id=7 /]
These are quick and dirty numbers, based on Alexa data, and my code might be wonky, so please don’t place too much faith in them.
I only looked at the “new” gTLDs introduced since 2001, as well as two mass-market ccTLDs (.co and .me) introduced over the same period.
The .co numbers do not include third-level domains under .com.co and the ccTLD’s other legacy extensions.
The “Months Active” column is the number of months since the TLD was delegated into the DNS root, measured by the date of the first registry report it filed with ICANN or the IANA (re)delegation date, not the date of general availability.
The fourth column is the number of domains divided by the number of months. It’s a fairly arbitrary measure, presented merely to give you an idea of the “success” of the TLD over time.
You could possibly, loosely, think of it as “how many domains a TLD can expect to get into the Alexa 1 Million per month”.
By that measure, .xxx isn’t doing too badly.
It’s even beating .jobs and .tel in absolute terms.

Did a university just pay $3,000 for its .xxx domain?

The domain name sju.xxx has changed hands for $3,000 on Sedo.
It’s the first .xxx domain I recall popping up in Sedo’s sales feed.
However, I think there’s a pretty good chance it’s a damage-mitigation move by an American university.
SJU is the acronym used by Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, PA. The college uses sju.edu as its primary domain.
Knowing how paranoid universities have been about protecting their reputations in .xxx, and given that the sale came in just below the price of a cheap UDRP, I suspect we’re looking at a defensive move.
The Whois record for the domain is currently under privacy protection. Until recently, it belonged to one Jay Camina. It resolves to a suggestive Go Daddy parking page.

ICM confirms three porn gTLD bids

ICM Registry has applied to ICANN for the new gTLDs .sex, .porn and .adult.
If its applications are successful, the company plans to automatically block any second-level domain that is already registered in .xxx, including the Sunrise B defensive registrations.
This means if you own example.xxx, the equivalent .sex, .porn and .adult domains would be reserved until you pay a “nominal” activation fee to activate them.
As well as trademark owners, that would probably be pretty good news for owners of “premium” .xxx domains.
According to ICM, the four domains will not be permanently linked, so if you own a good .xxx you’ll be able to pay a normal registration fee then activate and sell off the three “freebies”.
Because the domains would be permanently reserved, there would be no renewal fees until you choose to activate them, which could well be the same day you sell them.
There’s a good chance these gTLDs will be contested by other applicants and objected to by governments, of course.
I’ve written more on the announcement for The Register here.

YouPorn’s .xxx settlement talks extended

YouPorn owner Manwin, .xxx manager ICM Registry and ICANN have asked a California court for a few more weeks to settle Manwin’s antitrust lawsuit.
According to a court filing yesterday, the three want to extend ICANN and ICM’s window to respond to Manwin’s complaint extended from April 17. The submission reads:

The parties’ settlement discussions have not yet finished. In order to complete those discussions, the parties stipulate to extend, by an additional about three weeks until May 8, 2012, the deadline for Defendants to respond to Plaintiffs’ First Amended Complaint.

By May 8 the world is going to know whether ICM and/or Manwin have applied to ICANN for other adult-oriented gTLDs (.sex, .porn, etc), which could change the picture considerably.
Manwin sued ICANN and ICM in November, alleging that they colluded on .xxx to deliver “monopolistic conduct, price gouging, and anti-competitive and unfair practices”.
ICM and ICANN have denied the allegations.

Sunrise .xxx domains get 1.3 million hits a day

Domain names blocked by trademark holders during the .xxx sunrise period get 1.3 million hits per day, according to ICM Registry president Stuart Lawley.
The number refers to DNS queries arriving at the name servers ICM uses to serve up its standard blocking placeholder page.
I estimate that this works out to about 20 queries, on average, per domain per day.
The placeholder is displayed whenever a web user visits a domain that was registered during the Sunrise B launch phase last October.
A million DNS queries does not necessarily indicate a million page views, of course. Spiders and other automated processes likely account for some of the query traffic.
ICM does not monetize the pages, and because the names resolve to a standard placeholder ISPs don’t get to monetize the error traffic either.

ICM offers free .xxx domains to porn stars

ICM Registry and Name.com have teamed up to give a free one-year .xxx domain name registration to 3,500 selected porn stars.
It’s part of ICM’s Adult Performer Program, which saw these performers’ names initially reserved.
According to ICM, Name.com has pre-paid for the first year’s registration, valid until February 3 next year, but participating individuals will of course be free to move to another registrar if they choose.
That works out to $210,000 in registry fees, if I’m understanding the deal correctly, which seems like a bit of a risk given the general hostility to .xxx from the mainstream porn industry.
Name.com charges $84.99 for .xxx domains.
The Adult Performer Program came in for a bit of criticism last year, when some actresses tried to defensively register their names not realizing they had been reserved.

ICM and YouPorn in antitrust settlement talks

It’s Valentine’s Day, so perhaps it’s appropriate that ICM Registry has just revealed that it’s in talks to settle the .xxx antitrust lawsuit filed by one of the world’s biggest porn networks.
ICM and Manwin Licensing may soon resolve the case, which Manwin filed in November over the “extortion” it saw in the launch of the .xxx top-level domain, according to court documents.
In a joint filing, Manwin and ICM, along with ICANN and Digital Playground – the fellow plaintiff that Manwin has since acquired – said:

in recent days, Plaintiffs and ICM have engaged in discussions aimed at resolving the disputes that are the subject of this litigation.
The parties believe that additional time would potentially allow the parties to resolve all or some portion of their disputes.

The filing stipulates that Manwin has until this Friday to file an amended complaint and that ICANN and ICM should have 60 days after that to file their responses to the complaint.
That’s assuming that the suit isn’t completely settled in the meantime, of course.
The ICANN and ICM motions to dismiss filed in January have been taken off-calendar until Manwin amends its complaint.
I understand that ICANN also has secured a 60-day extension to its deadline to respond to the separate Manwin Independent Review Panel proceeding.
Manwin, which runs Brazzers, YouPorn and the Playboy-branded web sites, claimed in its complaint that the approval of .xxx in the absence of a competitive tender and its subsequent launch policies and pricing violated US antitrust laws.
ICANN and ICM claimed in their responses last month that the company was just scared of a little competition.

First .xxx cybersquatting complaint filed by porn site

The new .xxx top-level domain has seen its first cybersquatting complaint filed by a porn site.
The registrant of the domain femjoy.xxx was hit by a UDRP complaint in with the World Intellectual Property Organization late last week.
FemJoy.com is a well-known “artistic nude” porn site, according to the adult industry trade press.
While there have already been 12 UDRP cases filed against .xxx registrants, the previous cases have all been filed by the owners, such as banks and retailers, of non-porn trademarks.
The femjoy.xxx case appears to be the first instance of a cybersquatting complaint filed by a porn site.
Complainant Georg Streit has owned a US trademark on “FemJoy” – covering “magazines and periodicals featuring photographs and images of landscapes and human bodies” – since 2007.
The registrant of femjoy.xxx is an Australian called Tu Nguyen, according to Whois records. The domain does not currently resolve. In fact, it doesn’t even have name servers.