Everyone keeps saying that nobody spoke up. It's just not true, ICANN didn't listen or seriously review recent or historical commentary. I feel the same today as I did 5 years ago (below). Difference is, today my statement would cover about 75,000 hosted adult web sites and more than 700 adult companies from around the world. Out of my client list today, in total perhaps a handful of clients (to my surprise) who are in favor.
Fast forward to the present. Life has moved forward, what was speculation has become part of our new reality. In the history of adult, many different events have themselves represented a paradigm shift and "moving of the carrot":
- Pay per click to rev share
- Rev share to pay per sign-up
- Cross-selling and blind cross-selling
- Picture posts to movie posts with 10-30 second clips
- Movie posts to tube sites
- Rampant copyright infringement, clips and full movies
- Bandwidth from $100+ megabit to "dollars" each (opportunity)
- Effective pop-up blocking
- ACACIA patent (finally defeated)
- mobile saturation
...and now, I guess .XXX
Our industry has much in common with the shark, crocodile... cockroach. It persists and adapts to changes in the global environment. Despite having lemons thrown at us, I am confident in our overall ability to make lemonade out of each and every situation. I encourage everyone to keep working hard, investing in their business, adapting to change as they see fit. Let your future business decisions be driven by whatever drives you, whether that is creativity, ethics, morals, technology, trademark, copyright. If you can afford the time and money to do it, speak up and be heard when you have something to say. Protect your intellectual property and trademark(s).
It may come to pass that this TLD attains no special SEO treatment or introduces any new legal dilemmas. It stands to reason that whatever volume of land rush, speculated domains with weak content as landing pages won't stick or be meaningful to surfers. If all that becomes the case, business would be very much unaffected. Hopefully, only leaving opportunity for new development.. a level playing field for words and phrases that are not trademarked and start from 0 with their traffic.
One thing is likely certain - those who choose to try and squat on, develop or hold hostage existing trademarks will likely learn some hard lessons. I wish everyone the best of luck with their endeavors. This is just another curve ball, very likely (I hope) something to assimilate into the marketplace without "worst case" "end of times" disruption that is feared by many.
Sincerely,
Brad Mitchell
MojoHost
MojoHost and
"10,000+ Adult Sites Say "NO!" to .XXX Proposal
To: <xxx-tld-agreement@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: MojoHost and 10,000+ Adult Sites Say "NO!" to .XXX Proposal
From: "Brad Mitchell" <brad@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 9 May 2006 17:47:43 -0400
To Whom it May Concern,
On behalf of MojoHost and the over 10,000 adult web sites that our clients
entrust to our care we would like to voice our objection to the proposed
.XXX top level domain. This proposed top level domain does not serve the
interests of the public, our clientele, the European Union, Australian
Government or even United States based religious interest groups. We
believe that this proposal represents profiteering in it's purest form and
that it does so at a significant cost to the liberties and livelihoods of
tens thousands of honest business people. Beyond all of that, as a parent
and a technically skilled professional I truly believe that a new top level
domain will do NOTHING to protect children.
Regardless of how the mainstream press may portray the adult internet, the
reality is that our industry does more to regulate and police itself than
any other sector online. We believe that the creation of a new .XXX top
level domain is unnecessary, unjust and unenforceable and sincerely hope
that ICANN takes the matter seriously enough to evaluate all of these
concerns and come to the same conclusion that the adult industry has - that
.XXX is a horrible idea. There are already systems in place such as ICRA
that the largest adult sites with the most traffic have already implemented,
the rest is up to responsible parenting.
With seven years of business ownership and professional involvement with the
online adult internet I can sincerely say that the entire community shares
the same desire, stopping .XXX
Sincerely,
Brad Mitchell
President
MojoHost.com"