Lawley, joined with counsel Robert Corn-Revere and ICRA’s Stephen Balkam on the panel, was blasted by adult entertainment attorney Gregory Piccionelli, another panelist, who said the proposal won’t help the issue of segregating online porn from the rest.
“The promise is, the check is in the mail; the promise is, I’m not going to cum in your mouth,” said Piccionelli, who drew laughter from nearly 300 attendees.
“At the heart of the .XXX debate is a political and money issue,” he said. “Equally at its heart is the freedom and right of the people in this business not to be sequestered in a ghetto. If you’ve got manure in a gold frame, that’s what you’ve got.”
ICANN has decided to revisit the issue of a .XXX sTLD registry nearly eight months after its board shelved ICM Registry’s plan.
If approved, ICM would be required to help develop requirements that would create mechanisms to regulate companies that choose .XXX.
Piccionelli believes that adult companies would eventually face a mandatory .XXX for online sites because lawmakers in the U.S. and other countries would choose it.
“I have reason to believe that a mandatory .XXX would have bipartisan support,” he said.
If it gets the green light, Jupiter, Fla.-based ICM would be required to contract third parties to monitor registrant compliance with content site-labeling requirements. It also would be required to create a set of “best practices” to protect children online and fund the International Foundation for Online Responsibility, an independent organization ICM has said it would create if approved.
The use of the proposed .XXX domain name would remain voluntary, but any online site that chooses to use it would be subject to the new terms.
ICM, as in the original proposal, pledges to donate $10 of the proposed annual fee of $60 for a .XXX domain name to child-protection groups and to require users of .XXX to label their content. The deal with ICANN, Lawley said, would be for 10 years.
Already, ICM has a long list of companies that have pre-registered for .XXX domain names.
“At first I thought we’d have an initial 150,000 entries,” Lawley said. “Now I think we’ll do 500,000 [over a 2-year period].”
Dozens of attendees peppered Lawley, Corn-Revere and Balkam with an array of questions that continued the .XXX debate well after its alloted time.
Later, ASACP Executive Director Joan Irvine told panelists that her group is “neutral” on the .XXX proposal, contrary to other reports.
“There is nothing there … no deals,” she said. “We have not received any funds [from ICM].”
