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XXX: The new home for porn? Declan McCullagh
CNET News.com
March 24, 2004, 14:55 GMT
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A British entrepreneur is trying to get an .xxx top-level domain up and running as a home for adult content - 'sex is a very big area on the internet', he says
By the end of this year, Internet users could have an extraordinarily convenient place to find pornography: a new .xxx top-level domain.
Stuart Lawley, a 41-year-old entrepreneur in Florida, is the unlikely champion for the online equivalent of a red-light district. A British citizen, Lawley swears that he's no smut-seller himself. "I have no current or historic links to the adult industry in any form," he asserts.
That appears to be true. Lawley started Oneview.net, a UK business Internet provider, in the 1990s and cashed out at the height of the dot-com craze in March 2000. A profile in The Guardian newspaper a few months earlier pegged his net worth to be in the tens of millions of dollars.
After a brief, sunny retirement in the Bahamas where he learned how to golf and spear fish, Lawley moved to Florida and got the itch to get involved with the Internet again.
"Sex is a very big area on the Internet," Lawley said. "Our research staff surprised me. I couldn't believe how prevalent it was and what the actual statistics were for the number of sites and the number of users."
Under his proposal, submitted last week to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), .xxx domain names would be sold for $70 to $75 each. Child pornography would be verboten, but pretty much anything else would be permissible, Lawley said. "Apart from child pornography, which is completely illegal, we're really not in the content-monitoring business."
Instead, Lawley and his partners are in the business to make money. A report from Reuters Business Insight in February 2003 calculated that sex represented two-thirds of all online content revenue in 2001, and that it had ballooned to a $2.5bn industry since then. Lawley estimates that 25 percent of all Internet search queries are related to sex and that over am adult domain names exist. Owning the rights to sell pieces of .xxx real estate, he concluded, would be a perfect way to make money off of consumers' insatiable appetite for online raunch and ribaldry.
Free-expression issues
The way the proposed .xxx registry would work is twofold. Lawley's company, ICM Registry, would handle the technical aspects of running the master database of .xxx sex sites. For its troubles, it would charge $60 a domain name and let resellers add their own markup of perhaps $10 to $15 per domain.
A second, nonprofit organisation, the International Foundation for Online Responsibility, would be in charge of setting the rules for .xxx. It would have a seven-person board of directors, including a child advocacy advocate, a free-expression aficionado, and, naturally, at least one person from the adult entertainment industry. As president and chairman of ICM Registry, Lawley gives himself just one vote on the board.
The foundation's charter is intentionally quite protective of free speech. It aims to "protect the privacy and security of consenting adult consumers of online adult-entertainment goods and services" and references the free-expression principles in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.