PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. — ICM Registry's applications for .sex, .porn and .adult are bound for approval now that the objection period for generic TLDs is closed, said Stuart Lawley, who runs the company's .XXX registry as president.
"All objections have been published and the ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee has spoken and, in all cases, our three applications remain unaffected," Lawley told XBIZ.
The one stumbling block for ICM Registry, however, is .sex, which also is being sought by another company — Internet Marketing Solutions Ltd. The decision over .sex could be made at auction.
If the .sex issue is resolved in its favor and if ICANN approves the gTLDs, ICM Registry plans to offer automatic grandfathering for the three proposed gTLDs to existing .XXX registrants at no cost.
"The grandfathering option will save a lot of money and potential angst for our many registrants," Lawley said.
Thousands of new gTLDs will be approved by ICANN this year, but not all will launch at once. Applicants paid $185,000 per domain to apply for gTLDs.
Lawley said that ICM Registry is the only registry to date that offers a permanent block option for defensive domains. The registry likely would market the device for domains under the three proposed gTLDs.
When it launched 1-1/2 years ago, 70,000 of the initial .XXX 210,000 registrations were defensive, said Lawley, who noted that those numbers were culled from the Sunrise B blocks during the prelaunch.
"It is my opinion that with the upcoming launch of so many new TLDs many companies will take a more hands-off approach to protecting their brands and will avail themselves of the new Uniform Rapid Suspension service plus many of the new registries' anti-abuse policies rather than going ahead a trying to register in many, frankly, unrelated TLDs," Lawley said.
ICANN'S Uniform Rapid Takedown is modeled on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and takes 48 hours to suspend a domain name.