ICANN approves .XXX red-light district for the Internet

[brunner at nic-naa.net (Eric Brunner-Williams)]

On 3/26/11 5:17 PM, Scott Howard wrote:
...
> But do you really believe playboy are going to give up playboy.com?  Or that
> new websites are going to register an address that will result in their
> website not being visible by 1/6th of the worlds population (
> http://uk.ibtimes.com/articles/127009/20110325/india-blocks-xxx-domain.htm -
> and we all know China and several other countries won't be far behind so
> we're probably talking closer to half or more of the worlds population).

Claim 1. That return on investment is proportional to population, 
overlooking the density of graphic displays, and bandwidth 
provisioning, which are probably not prudently overlooked from a 
bizplan perspective.

Google metrics give 72.4 million pages in Estonian, 86.9 million pages 
in Hebrew and 88.1 million pages in Greek, and 108 million pages in 
Hindi in the .com name space, suggesting that the natural traffic for 
existing .com Hindi language (422 million native speakers) properties 
is similar to that of Hebrew (7.6 million speakers, second language 
speakers included), or Greek (11.3 million native speakers) or 
Estonian (1.3 million speakers).

Overlooking differences in currency, disposable incomes, and cultural 
norms, which are probably not prudently overlooked from a bizplan 
perspective, a Hindi targeted .xxx enterprise is about as interesting 
as a Utah or Rhode Island targeted .xxx enterprise.

To put it gently, there is more money in the metro east, Atlanta to 
Boston, than in India, or China, or India and China, even if the 
respective governments wanted revenue shares not firewalls.


> At first glance this might sounds like a good idea, but do you know any
> *.travel or *.asia (etc) websites that don't also have the equivalent or
> similar .com version?  Nobody uses these domains as their only domain, it's
> just yet another one that they will register - and yet more money they need
> to pay to the registries each year to protect their brand.


Claim 2. That domains that have no pre-existing, or simultaneous 
existence in .com form a set of measure zero (or something handwavy 
close to that when I'm not pretending to be a mathematician).

At present at least 50% of all .cat domains have no pre-existing, or 
simultaneous existence in .com or .es.

This form of claim is highly relevant to competition policy, as it may 
be considered a form of "market power". In this form Verisign has 
"market power" relative to .travel/.asia, but has no "market power" 
relative to .cat. Therefore Verisign may exercise that market power 
over registrars selling Verisign's inventory, as well as Afilias' 
inventories, as well as .travel inventory.

Eric