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ICANN Review Panel Finds US Religious Right Pressure In Denial of .xxx TLD

By Howard M. Friedman

ICANN is a non-profit corporation charged with overseeing the protocols and domain names system of the entire Internet. Challenges to any of its actions can be submitted for an advisory arbitration opinion of an Independent Review Panel. In the first ever use of the review panel process, a Panel last week found that ICANN's board acted improperly in 2007 when, under pressure from the U.S. government and others, it reversed a decision it had reached earlier and refused to allow ICM Registry to introduce a new .xxx top level domain that would identify pornographic websites. In ICM Registry, LLC v. ICANN, (ICDR, Feb. 19, 2010), the Panel, in a 2-1 decision, concluded in part:

The volte face in the position of the United States Government ... appeared to have been stimulated by a cascade of protests by American domestic organizations such as the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family. Thousands of email messages of identical text poured into the Department of Commerce demanding that .XXX be stopped.... [W]hile officials of the Department of Commerce concerned with Internet questions earlier did not oppose and indeed apparently favored ICANN?s approval of the application of ICM, the Department of Commerce was galvanized into opposition by the generated torrent of negative demands, and by representations by leading figures of the so-called ?religious right?, such as Jim Dobson, who had influential access to high level officials of the U.S. Administration.

Goldstein Report, Thinq.co.uk and The Domains all report on the Panel's decision. ICANN has links to all the pleadings and briefs in the proceedings. As a result of the decision, apparently ICM will begin offering .xxx top level domains later this year. (See prior related posting.)

Full post as published by Religion Clause on February 23, 2010 (boomark / email).