Personally, my view is as follows ... I think the domain is a problematic one.
Indeed. It basically forces ICANN to decide whether they are the modest group of technical coordinators they purport to be, or a political policy organization. In the former case, they'd treat .XXX like any other application and approve it if they met the specs for technical and financial adequacy, which without question it does. In the latter case, they'd use some criteria to decide which applications are meritorious and which aren't. So far, they've managed to do a botch job and approve a trickle of domains based on criteria which nobody, I believe including the ICANN board, can understand or explain. My inclination would be to say that top level domains are only a big deal because there's an artificially limited supply, so lose the chokepoint and start issuing domains at a faster and predictable pace. If .XXX were the 70th or 700th domain rather than the 7th, would people really care? Paul Hoffman and I wrote a joint blog entry a year ago suggesting how to do this. See http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/whydom.html Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://johnlevine.com, Mayor "I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.