Why Fresh TLD Applicants Are Excited Regarding .XXX

Hint: It has nothing to do with the actual TLD.

Were you surprised to see so many fresh TLD applicants advocating for ICANN to approve .xxx at the ICANN meeting last month? Regardless of their thoughts on the top level domain name and the process, they had their reasons.

I had caught wind of this a couple weeks ago, but Antony Van Couvering of Minds + Machines spells it out in explicit terms in a recent blog post:

The Board’s decision to green-light .XXX means fresh gTLD applicants can breathe a sigh of relief. The approval means that the fresh gTLDs program will not be threatened by .XXX-inspired court interference in the gTLD process. ICM Registry, .XXX’s sponsor, would almost certainly have sued ICANN if the decision had gone differently, and very likely they would have asked for an injunction to stop the introduction of fresh gTLDs — and they might have been successful. The ICANN Board decision to go ahead with .XXX, still heavily hedged with caveats, removes this threat. That’s good news for gTLD applicants.

There are certainly other legal threats to the introduction of fresh top level domain names. Depending on how it’s request for special status went (goes?), the Olympics might file suit. This might not kill fresh TLDs, but will certainly slow them down.