ICANN has approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, paving the way for a whole slew of new addresses suffixed by the famous triplicate x. You can reserve domains through its sponsor, ICM Registry, and .XXX domains will cost at least $60 to register once they become available in the next couple of months.
The ICANN board scheduled a special meeting in Singapore on June 20 to vote on confirming a guide book outlining the path aspiring domain operators would need to follow to use a suffix of their choosing.
In a potential sign of how the vote will turn out, ICANN has a celebration party planned for two days after the vote.
ICANN has spent years crafting a guide for approving applications for any suggested top level domains. Currently, the agency individually endorses domain name petitions.
The process encountered controversy after feedback in a government action committee included interest by the United States in veto power to preclude the creation of top level domains such as .gay that might be blocked in some countries.
The ICANN board on Friday did approve a petition to operate an .xxx domain. The request had been rejected about five years ago and was reconsidered after an appeal.
As far as end users are concerned, the introduction of the .XXX domain will mean very little. It will make a fantastic amount of money for domain registrars, but unless search engines like Google change their ranking algorithms to bias the new TLD, we probably won’t even notice the new domains. There aren’t even any funny domain names that you can make with the .XXX suffix!
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