by kierenmccarthy on June 23, 2010
This Friday, it looks as though the ICANN Board will follow the clear conclusions drawn by its independent review and approve dot-xxx.
Given the importance of the first use of the review process, the importance of the Board being seen to be accountable and the fact that the community was pretty unanimous in recent public comment, it is pretty much the only reasonable course of action.
The question then is: how do things move forward? The company behind dot-xxx, ICM Registry, has published what it thinks is the best approach, but in both pieces of work put before the Board by ICANN staff, has been the suggestion that the Board would need to go back to the GAC before making dot-xxx a reality.
The question is: why? Unfortunately, neither paper makes it particularly clear. As far as I can determine, not only is there no need to go back to the GAC over dot-xxx but it also unlikely to serve any real purpose, and it may even put the GAC into a difficult position where it effectively approves a controversial top-level domain.
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by kierenmccarthy on May 18, 2010
I have spent the past week going through literally thousands of comments about whether there should be a new dot-xxx Internet extension for pornography. You won’t be surprised to hear it has brought out some strong feelings.
Anyway, the company behind the application, ICM Registry, hired me to write an objective summary of what was said. There were nearly 13,000 comments, which would have been impossible to read and analyse but, fortunately I suppose, more than 80 percent of them said the exact same thing. The majority of the remainder were also the result of no less than 10 online campaigns.
Not that it wasn’t exceptionally time-consuming to go through every one in an effort to extract common arguments and then summarise them. I did my absolute best to get the overall length down to something bearable but it still ended up at 45 pages. I suspect most people won’t get past the four-page Executive Summary, despite the inclusion of several pretty graphics to give the eyes a rest.
Anyway, I will let my week’s worth of work speak for itself. The whole glorious thing is below:
Summary/analysis of the following comment period:
Report of Possible Process Options for Further Consideration of the ICM Application for the .XXX sTLD
Date opened: 26 March 2010
Date closed: 10 May 2010
Prepared by: Kieren McCarthy
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Summary/analysis of dot-xxx issue
by kierenmccarthy on May 18, 2010
I have spent the past week going through literally thousands of comments about whether there should be a new dot-xxx Internet extension for pornography. You won’t be surprised to hear it has brought out some strong feelings.
Anyway, the company behind the application, ICM Registry, hired me to write an objective summary of what was said. There were nearly 13,000 comments, which would have been impossible to read and analyse but, fortunately I suppose, more than 80 percent of them said the exact same thing. The majority of the remainder were also the result of no less than 10 online campaigns.
Not that it wasn’t exceptionally time-consuming to go through every one in an effort to extract common arguments and then summarise them. I did my absolute best to get the overall length down to something bearable but it still ended up at 45 pages. I suspect most people won’t get past the four-page Executive Summary, despite the inclusion of several pretty graphics to give the eyes a rest.
Anyway, I will let my week’s worth of work speak for itself. The whole glorious thing is below:
Summary/analysis of the following comment period:
Report of Possible Process Options for Further Consideration of the ICM Application for the .XXX sTLD
Date opened: 26 March 2010
Date closed: 10 May 2010
Prepared by: Kieren McCarthy
[click to continue…]
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