GoDaddy’s .xxx gTLD will no longer be “sponsored”, following a vote of ICANN’s board of directors last week.
At its ICANN 81 AGM in Istanbul, the board approved the renewal of GoDaddy subsidiary ICM Registry’s Registry Agreement.
The new deal closely follows the text of the standard RA most other gTLDs use, scrapping restrictions that GoDaddy found onerous but which were vital in getting the deal approved in the first place back in 2011.
It means the end of IFFOR, the International Foundation For Online Responsibility, the largely toothless oversight body that had been tasked with creating policies and issuing grants to worth causes but arguably did neither.
It also means less friction for the .xxx registration process, as registrants will no longer have to affirm they are members of the “sponsored community”, which never existed in any real sense anyway.
Some elements of the original sponsorship agreement, such as strict prohibitions on child sexual abuse material and the suggestion thereof, have been moved to Public Interest Commitments that ICANN could in theory enforce.
In its resolution text, ICANN noted that the Governmental Advisory Committee, which almost got .xxx killed off a couple decades ago, had not felt strongly enough about the new deal to publicly comment on it one way or the other.
.xxx makes most of its money from defensive registrations. It had almost 45,000 domains under management at the end of June, but barely 7,000 of those appeared in its zone file of the same date. That does not included domains blocked via the AdultBlock and GlobalBlock services, which are not counted in any public document but which I estimate are measured in five figures.
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