.XXX porn domain may rise again
Published: 22 May 2006 10:50 BST
A Florida company behind the .XXX domain, intended to be used for online pornography, is trying once again to have it approved.
By a 9-to-5 vote last month, ICANN, which governs Internet domains, shot down the idea of a virtual red-light district after the Bush administration and some other national governments made strong objections.
But ICM Registry said Friday that it will ask ICANN to reconsider.
ICM Registry released 88 pages of documents it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act showing how politicised the debate over .XXX had become inside the Bush administration last summer.
It was publicly known that conservative groups in the United States called on their supporters to ask the Commerce Department to block the new suffix, but the FOI documents reveal how aggressive the lobbying campaign actually was.
Mike Hurst, an aide to Chip Pickering, a Mississippi Republican who's one of the most conservative in Congress, pressured the Commerce Department not to ratify ICANN's decision -- and then reported his results back to conservative Christian lobby groups.
Pickering wrote to Jim Wasilewski, the director of Commerce's Office of Congressional Affairs, that Congress is "reviewing our options here on the Hill" -- Washington-speak for proposing legislation to block .XXX.
"I met with the Commerce Dept. folks today," Hurst wrote in a subsequent email message on 16 June 2005 to Christian groups including the American Family Association and the Family Research Council. Hurst suggested ICANN would be a better pressure point: "Maybe we can marshal all our resources toward ICANN?"
Another message shows that Pat Trueman from the Family Research Council and Jan LaRue met with John Kneuer, Commerce's deputy assistant secretary, on 21 June.
A few weeks later, in August 2005, the Bush administration made a move unprecedented in ICANN's eight-year history by sending a letter saying: "The Department of Commerce has received nearly 6,000 letters and emails from individuals expressing concern about the impact of pornography on families and children." ICANN had endorsed the concept of a .XXX domain in June and approval of ICM Registry's contract to run the suffix was expected to take place in a routine vote in late summer.
Commerce Department officials appeared worried about an even more public outcry from conservative groups. The Family Research Council, for instance, warned on its Web site that "pornographers will be given even more opportunities to flood our homes, libraries and society with pornography through the .XXX domain".
An email message dated 16 June 2005 from Fred Schwein, the department's executive secretary, said: "Who really matters in this mess is Jim Dobson. What he says on his radio program in the morning will determine how ugly this really gets -- if he jumps on the bandwagon, our mail server may crash."
Dobson is a right-wing evangelical Christian commentator.
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