WWW- The resurrected proposal to open an internet domain reserved for porn web sites is looking less likely to succeed, with ICANN’s board of directors last week expressing ‘serious concerns’ about it.

A majority of ICANN’s directors are concerned that .xxx may not be wanted by the adult entertainment industry it would purport to serve, according to minutes of a February 12 ICANN board meeting published Friday.

A Florida-based company, ICM Registry Inc, has been fighting for approval to launch .xxx for almost seven years. It has faced substantial opposition from religious groups and some international governments, as well as influential figures in the adult industry.

ICANN, the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers, has powers granted by the US government to decide which top-level domains should be on the internet, and who should operate them. Its board has the power to approve or reject new domains.

Its board agreed last Monday that “a majority of the board has serious concerns about whether the proposed .xxx domain has the support of a clearly-defined sponsored community as per the criteria for sponsored TLDs”.

In other words, most of the board are still not convinced that the adult entertainment industry actually wants the .xxx domain.

During the Monday meeting, only three ICANN directors indicated they had no serious concerns on this count. Eight others said they did, while ICANN president Paul Twomey fence-sat.

The .xxx domain is being proposed as a “sponsored top-level domain” or sTLD, an ICANN invention designed to differentiate restricted, gated communities from open “generic” TLDs like .com and .info.

Sponsored TLDs approved to date include .mobi, which had substantial backing from the mobile telephony industry, and .jobs, which had some support from human resources organizations.

To get to run an sTLD, you need to show you have a community which supports you, and ICM’s problem is that there is substantial opposition to .xxx within the adult webmaster community.

The .xxx proposal was buried, believed dead, last year, but was resurrected last month and opened once more for public discussion.

According to ICANN’s minutes, of the 88 adult webmasters that contacted ICANN during a recent public comment period, only 23 were in favor of the domain.

That’s a 26% approval rating, pretty low but still higher than the 16% portion of favorable comments received overall during the comment period. Most respondents were those opposed to pornography in general and see .xxx as an endorsement of the industry.

ICANN received over 600 comments, and an additional 55,000 emails of objection sent via a form email organized by a religious group. It has received over 200,000 such emails since the current phase of the .xxx application began.

However, while it was arguably the religious right that caused ICANN to shelve ICM’s proposal last year, it is now adult webmasters themselves that are the main barrier to .xxx.

At X-Biz Hollywood, a recent adult industry conference held in Los Angeles, most participants appeared to believe that .xxx is a bad idea, according to on-site reports.

During an X-Biz panel discussion, a request for applause by all those who did not support .xxx caused “a protracted standing ovation, in which the vast majority of the audience participated”, according to Ynot.com, an adult industry news service.

ICM president Stuart Lawley’s [pictured] response, according to Ynot and previous interviews with Computer Business Review, is that this opposition is largely California-based, and that he has had over 1,500 letters of support from the adult industry in 71 countries.

A key concern from the porn business is that while ICM’s .xxx would be voluntary, there would almost certainly be moves from legislatures in the US and elsewhere for .xxx to be mandatory, so pornography can be more easily filtered from the view of minors. ICM has committed to fight such moves with its own money, and believes that any legislation making .xxx mandatory would be unconstitutional in the US under the First Amendment. The firm has retained noted civil liberties lawyer Robert Corn-Revere to argue this point.