ICM Registry FILES INDEPENDENT REVIEW PETITION AGAINST ICANN

[polish_aristocrat]

Not sure if this has gotten GFY's attention yet.

ICM's (the .xxx proponent's) website says:

BREAKING NEWS:
ICM Registry FILES INDEPENDENT
REVIEW PETITION AGAINST ICANN

icmregistry.com

you can read the petition here:

icmregistry.com/press.html

this article by CircleID.com also discusses this subject:

In a public letter posted on ICM Registry's Website, Stuart Lawley, Chairman and President of the organization has announced that last week an independent review petition against ICANN was filed. In March 2007, ICM's application for a new .XXX Top-Level Domain (TLD) was rejected by ICANN after a three year long process costing ICM reportedly over US$ 4 million in total (view all related posting). Following is the text from today's announcement:

"ICM has been wrongfully denied the opportunity to operate the proposed .XXX sTLD and gain the significant "first mover" business advantage that would have flowed from its registry contract for what has always been regarded as one of the more sought after and popular expected new TLDs. Further, ICANN's rejection of ICM's application has denied the benefits the sTLD would have provided to the sponsored community and other stakeholders, namely, empowering individuals wishing to select or avoid such adult content websites to do so easily and establishing a forum for the online adult entertainment community to communicate and proactively respond to the needs and concerns of the broader Internet community.

Indeed, this case?the first of its kind?strikes at the very heart of Internet governance. The arbitrary and discriminatory manner in which ICANN treated ICM's sTLD application requires a re-evaluation of such fundamental questions as "who" should govern the Internet and "how" should the Internet be governed. Under these circumstances, nothing less than an independent, impartial, and objective assessment of the facts and the law as they apply to ICANN's decision to reject ICM's application is required. Ultimately, the independent review and the resulting declarations from the three member panel will put to the test ICANN's true commitment to its core values and limited mission."

http://www.circleid.com/posts/86179_...eview_i cann/

[Socks]

dooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooshes

[FightThisPatent]

and i just let fightthedotxxx.com lapse onthe renewal
LOL


Fight the .$$$!

[AlienQ - BANNED FOR LIFE]

fUCKEN RETARDED dEUSCHE BAGS.

i THINK it would be a good idea to hit ICANN and thank them for turning away the application again.

[FightThisPatent]

note, the new chairman of the board, supported .xxx as a board member.


Fight the things that make you go hmmmmmm!

[seeric]

that extension will never exist.

[Compdoctor]

back again huh, damn it's only been a year

[Barefootsies]

Uh huh....

Stuart Lawley

This dickhead wants the .XXX so he can sit at the head of the table. If you look at these issues on the surface, or dig down, you can always see some asshat wants more power.

It's nothing more complicated then that in this case.

[mikeyddddd]

[Barefootsies]

Stuart is Chairman and President of ICM Registry.

Stuart Lawley is an experienced Chairman and Chief Executive, who has developed and successfully managed a number of UK and US businesses in office technology and the Internet. He was Chief Executive of Eurofax Ltd, Alto Group Ltd and Chairman of Oneview.net plc (all UK Companies). Oneview.net plc was a public company which listed on the Alternative Investment Market (a market similar to NASDAQ in the US) of the London Stock Exchange via an IPO. At the time of its sale in March 2000, it had grown from inception to over 400 employees in just 15 months. Oneview.net was an Internet B2b provider. Prior to Oneview, Stuart was CEO of Alto Group Ltd, which doubled in size to over 250 employees during his tenure. His first business, Eurofax, grew at a compound rate of over 40% consistently over 12 years. In addition, Lawley is an investor in and Chairman of a US based Home Automation company and a US based Data Storage reporting software company. He has a BSc in Engineering from the University of London, England..

http://icannwiki.org/Stuart_Lawley

[Barefootsies]

ICM Registry, the company that wants to launch the .xxx internet domain for pornography, is considering taking ICANN to court, after the domain name system overseer rejected its proposal.


"We will pursue this through the courts as necessary," ICM president Stuart Lawley told us. He's invested years and millions of his own money trying to get the .xxx domain approved.

ICANN's board of directors rejected .xxx with a 9 to 5 vote at a meeting in Lisbon, Portugal on Friday. Its president, Paul Twomey, who had helped negotiate the proposed contract, abstained. Chairman Vint Cerf voted to reject.

Lawley claimed that the two-year process leading up to the vote had been focused on hammering out the details of the contract under which .xxx would operate, and yet at the final hour many directors voted against it based on extra-contractual concerns.

"We got them in a position where their excuses had run out on the contract and they had to take a deep breath and say we don't want to do it for other reasons," Lawley said.

"You can't get away with wasting two years and $2m of somebody's time and money negotiating a contract you have no intention of signing," he added.

As well as the relatively small fees paid to ICANN, ICM had recruited a number of high-profile attorneys to help fight its cause, including noted civil liberties lawyer Robert Corn-Revere and former US government official Becky Burr, who was closely involved in ICANN's very creation in 1998.

Lawley is convinced that pressure from the US government following a letter-writing campaign by its right-wing religious supporters was responsible for the domain being rejected. He's currently suing the government for access to documents he says will prove this.

"I think that without US government interference in 2005, this would be a signed contract right now," he said.

In June 2005, ICANN voted to start negotiating a contract with ICM. To some observers it was implicit, but certainly not binding, that .xxx would ultimately be approved.

Later that summer, several American "family" groups with a heavily religious bent got wind of the proposal and started lobbying the US Department of Commerce, which oversees ICANN, to get .xxx killed.

Government emails released to ICM under the Freedom of Information Act show that Commerce took this right-wing outrage very seriously.

It does not appear on current evidence that the US government directly pressured ICANN's directors, most of whom are not US citizens, to vote down the .xxx proposal. Lawley says that the US worked through ICANN's Government Advisory Committee to stonewall and raise enough reasonable doubt to have it rejected.

That's arguably what ICANN's GAC is supposed to do -- provide public policy feedback from international governments. Any pressuring that went on must have gone on between government representatives behind the closed doors of GAC meetings.

The GAC's objections, which are over a year old and have been responded to by ICM on a number of occasions, comprised four of the five reasons that were entered into the record at the ICANN meeting for rejecting the .xxx proposal.

"ICM's response does not address the GAC's concern for offensive content, and similarly avoids the GAC's concern for the protection of vulnerable members of the community," the ICANN board resolved. "The Board does not believe these public policy concerns can be credibly resolved with the mechanisms proposed by the applicant."

ICM's proposal, while specifically not mandating that all adult content should be restricted to .xxx, did propose some level of oversight of the content that would end up on .xxx web sites.

The ICANN board resolved "there are credible scenarios that lead to circumstances in which ICANN would be forced to assume an ongoing management and oversight role regarding Internet content, which is inconsistent with its technical mandate."

Lawley, at an airport having just arrived back in the US from Lisbon, was disconnected before he could elaborate on what kind of legal action ICM intends to take.

Our View

ICANN may not want to regulate content, but that's exactly what it just did.

The .xxx domain was rejected because it was intended for porn. Other excuses are as disingenuous as they were poorly articulated.

Compare the rejection of .xxx to the approval of .mobi.

Several ICANN directors who voted to reject .xxx did so because they believed there were "credible scenarios" in which ICANN would be forced to answer for content regulation under .xxx, which is not its mission. Its mission is the technical stability of the DNS.

These same directors had no such concerns when unanimously approving .mobi, which proposed to regulate the content of a mobiles-only top-level domain. The .mobi domain was approved despite convincing arguments that it "broke" the spirit of the DNS by using top-level domains as protocol denominators.

Some directors voted against the .xxx domain because they were not convinced that ICM had met the ICANN definition of a "sponsored TLD community".

According to ICANN's 2003 request for proposals, a sponsored TLD community "should address the needs and interests of a clearly defined community... Precisely defined, so it can readily be determined which persons or entities make up that community; and Comprised of persons that have needs and interests in common differentiated from those of the general global Internet community".

ICM's community would have consisted of pornographers. A pretty distinct group of folk.

The .mobi community by contrast was "restricted" to everybody on the planet who owns a mobile phone -- a higher percentage of the population of Earth than those who own a PC. The gated community of .mobi ergo has a potentially broader audience than .com.

Clearly, the excuses used to reject .xxx were not evenly applied to other newly introduced domains. The .xxx proposal was rejected, fundamentally, because it was for porn and because some people are uncomfortable with that kind of thing.

That all being said, several ICANN directors were clearly correct when they said that, in the real world, many would look to ICANN to enforce .xxx's content policies, and that this would be a nightmare of epic proportions given the variety of pornography legislation around the world and the vehemence of the industry's opponents.

But that still boils down to the fact that .xxx was rejected because it was for porn. ICANN made a decision to regulate content when it rejected .xxx, even if it pretends otherwise.

On the flipside, it should also be noted that .xxx was not and is not ICM's birthright. Stuart Lawley is an entrepreneur businessman with no history in, and far from unanimous support from, the porn business. He and his company stood to gain financially from a .xxx approval. If it ever ends up on the internet, it will be a lucrative business.

ICM took an expensive gamble, investing millions in an ICANN process that so often appears arbitrary. It was a gamble that did not paid off. Not yet, anyway.

http://www.cbronline.com/article_new...7-09C46F2A894F

[Barefootsies]

The British man behind the proposed .xxx internet domain believes the US Government has intervened to thwart his plans. Stuart Lawley is fighting a court battle to retrieve the documents he says would prove his case.

Lawley made dotcom millions with web design and hosting firm Oneview.net which was floated then sold before the first internet crash, and has bank rolled the seven-year proposal to have a top level domain for pornography.

His firm ICM Registry was awarded the right to operate the domain but contractual wrangling is more about the conservative Bush administration's connections to the religious right than they are about the contract itself, Lawley told technology podcast OUT-LAW Radio.

"We were hoping to sign our contract which was a standard contract that most other registries have, until the United States Government intervened," said Lawley, who lives in Florida. "They had been lobbied very heavily by the Christian conservative groups here in the United States."

Lawley says that the US Department of Commerce's view of the proposal changed, which filtered down to ICANN. He said that he obtained some government documents under freedom of information legislation outlining parts of his case but that crucial elements were redacted, which means they were blanked out.

"We received documentation that showed clearly what had gone on. Some of the documents were sent in redacted form and we have litigation in the District of Columbia courts against the United States Department of Commerce and the United States Department of State to try and force them to turn over these documents that we allege show the level of interference in the ICANN process," said Lawley.

"The documents show that up to a certain date the Department of Commerce understood our application and were mildly approving of it," said Lawley. "After several high level meetings between Christian conservative leaders and administration and Department of Commerce officials the tone very much changed overnight into 'how do we stop this' and 'how do we kill it'. That's the nature of the documents we are trying to get more detail on."

Lawley says that the .xxx domain is a good idea because it introduces some self-regulation into a $5bn industry that does not currently police itself. His proposal mandates that anyone registering a .xxx domain must tag their content so that it is labelled as pornographic or adult material.

Even if the .xxx site merely points to a .com or .net domain, the content to which it ultimately points must be tagged, he said. He also said that $10 of the $60 annual registration fee will go to a foundation set up by his company to fund child protection online.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03...us_government/

[GeorgeK]

ICM Registry yesterday posted additional documents related to their appeal of the .xxx decision, see:

http://www.icmregistry.com/irp.html

[Snake Doctor]

Under these circumstances, nothing less than an independent, impartial, and objective assessment of the facts and the law

That's what they got the first time. I guess now they want an independent, impartial, and objective assessment that gives them what they want.

[baddog]

Originally Posted by Snake Doctor

That's what they got the first time. I guess now they want an independent, impartial, and objective assessment that gives them what they want.

He sounds like half of GFY.

[Snake Doctor]

Later that summer, several American "family" groups with a heavily religious bent got wind of the proposal and started lobbying the US Department of Commerce, which oversees ICANN, to get .xxx killed.

Government emails released to ICM under the Freedom of Information Act show that Commerce took this right-wing outrage very seriously.

Isn't it hilarious and ironic that the religious whackos are the ones who saved us from dot xxx?

[F-U-Jimmy]

Originally Posted by AlienQ

fUCKEN RETARDED dEUSCHE BAGS.

i THINK it would be a good idea to hit ICANN and thank them for turning away the application again.

Thats an excellent idea

[baddog]

Originally Posted by Snake Doctor

Isn't it hilarious and ironic that the religious whackos are the ones who saved us from dot xxx?

Or that the Bush Administration did. Will we be blaming Obama if it passes this time?

[tony286]

man its like one of those fucking horror movies where the monster wont fucking die.

[tony286]

but actually with that thing they passed we couldnt we actually see .xxx .nude .sex .fuck .porn etc etc so there could be the porn tld wars.

[Snake Doctor]

Originally Posted by baddog

Or that the Bush Administration did. Will we be blaming Obama if it passes this time?

I dunno, depends on how it all plays out I guess.

I doubt they're gonna touch this one though...they can't win.

If it passes the repubs will send out fundraising mailers with stuff like "Obama gave pornographers their very own domain extension...why does Obama love the pornographers that are preying on your children?"

If it doesn't pass, they'll slam him for not wanting to segregate porn from the rest of the internet.

If he's smart (and he is) he won't go anywhere near this.