This post was mentioned on Twitter by berkens: Will ICANN On Now Approve .XXX? ICM Says Yes; ICANN Seems To Say No http://ow.ly/1p8191...

I was not active in the ICA back in 2007 so thanks for catching me up to speed.

Will the ICA be filing or re-filing its objections to the .xxx extension at or before the March 12 ICANN meeting?

ICM will donate $10 per year to fund IFFOR’s policy development activities and to provide financial support for the work of online safety organizations, child pornography hotlines, and to sponsor the development of tools and technology to promote child safety and child pornography.

While child porn is detestable this pledge appeared to be little more than a sop designed to facilitate ICANN approval of the contract, since ICM had already pledged to police .xxx so that it contained no child porn would be available at any .xxx domain, and also considering that this type of illegal content is available through other TLDs. The issue here is not whether contributions to such groups (assuming they are legitimate) is a good thing, but whether domain registrants want to start paying “taxes” built into their registry fees for purposes that have nothing to do with the technical database authentication and security services being provided.

The Executive Summary of ICA’s February 2006 follows. If this is the contract that ICANN must now consider approving then all the same issues have come back to the fore:

The ICA takes no position on the general question of whether it is appropriate to authorize any specialized top level domain (TLD), including .XXX, with the intent and expectation that it host explicit adult sexual content. However, we would oppose any requirement that content of a particular nature, including sexual content, be hosted and located solely at specifically designated TLD. The DNS should not be utilized as a means of zoning the Internet for the purpose of segregating content of any nature, as any fiat to that effect inevitably involves registries in the classification and possible censorship of content, and also requires ICANN to stray far from its narrow and proper mission in order to enforce the operative provisions of registry agreements and overarching ICANN policies.

For the reasons stated below, the ICA is firmly opposed to ICANN Board approval of the Revised Proposed Agreement (RPA) on .XXX, and urges the Board to reject it promptly and with finality.

Executive Summary

The ICA opposes approval of the Revised Proposed Agreement on .XXX because—
1. The RPA would inevitably involve ICANN, through its enforcement authority and responsibility, in matters that lie far outside its narrow technical mission and are the proper province of national government and multinational law enforcement and consumer protection authorities.
2. The RPA would set a number of extremely undesirable precedents, including–
• Establishing registry-specific content restrictions that will authorize the registry operator to establish proprietary extralegal standards and to review and prohibit otherwise legal content.
• Requiring registrants to involuntarily contribute, through a designated “tax” built into their registry fee, to specified public interest organizations based upon the nature of the content hosted at their domain name; as well as support third party monitoring activities that presume that registrants will not abide by their contractual obligations.
• Establishing a registry-specific forum, outside of ICANN’s own internal structure for receiving input from interested parties, for the discussion and resolution of matters that are pervasive to most or all TLDs.
3. The sponsoring organization for .XXX appears to be presently controlled by the registry proposing this new TLD – an entity standing to gain very substantial revenues if the RPA is approved — and there is no assurance that this sponsor will ever achieve sufficient independence, much less adequate participation from those parties who might utilize this new TLD. As a general matter, the approval of any sponsored TLD (sTLD) should be contingent upon a finding by ICANN that the sponsoring organization is a bona fide and independent entity at the time the TLD proposal is submitted for its consideration, and not merely a registry-controlled “shell” to be given substance at some later date; and that the proposed contract governing the relationship between the sponsor and registry operator be available to the community and Board prior to any Board vote on a proposed TLD.
4. The process by which this RPA was negotiated and presented to the broad ICANN community once again, unfortunately, provides evidence that ICANN is in need of profound internal culture reform as regards transparency and accountability. The very fact that ICANN staff and .XXX proponents were in continuing discussions and negotiations following the Board’s 9 to 5 vote against the proposed .XXX agreement on May 10, 2006 was neither publicized by ICANN nor known by the interested Internet community – the existence of these ongoing proceedings was in fact opaque to and hidden from that community. At no time during these negotiations did ICANN seek any input from the community as regards the appropriateness of the significant precedents that the developing agreement would set, a failure in regard to both transparency and accountability. Additionally, the January 5th notice of the Revised Proposed Agreement fails to contain a single word of explanation as to why ICANN staff believe the provisions of the newly negotiated Appendix to the original agreement sufficiently address the concerns of the community that resulted in the Board’s rejection of that agreement by a nearly 2 to 1 margin. Nor is there a single word of recognition or discussion in the January 5th notice that the proposed Appendix contains numerous provisions that establish new precedents that could well migrate to other TLD registry agreements and would inevitably involve ICANN in areas far outside the scope of its narrow technical mission if it takes its contract enforcement responsibilities seriously. The ICA finds it inexplicable that ICANN would operate in such an opaque and unaccountable manner in regard to a registry proposal that had generated widespread criticism and debate as well as input from an unusually broad and diverse range of commentators both within and outside the general ICANN community. This failure is particularly incomprehensible given that the decision as to whether ICANN should be completely privatized at the conclusion of its current Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) in 2009 is contingent, first and foremost, on its achievement of greater transparency and accountability in its operations. We would respectfully suggest that, particularly during a period when ICANN is seeking to achieve full privatization, it should adhere strictly to its narrow technical responsibilities and should not be clandestinely negotiating revised agreements for controversial TLDs that would inevitably require substantial expansion of its staff (and substantial additional financial support from domain name registrants) for contract oversight and enforcement responsibilities regarding matters that fall far outside its intended mission and implicate powers and duties that properly belong to national governments and multilateral organizations.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/23/icann_dot_xxx_decision_to_be_reconsidered/