PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla.—ICM Registry posted a response Thursday to the Sept. 8 letter from the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) to ICANN general counsel John Jeffrey.
The ICM letter from CEO Stuart Lawley can be found in the public comment area of the ICANN website. The ICM letter contains a point-by-point refutation of the arguments made by Executive Director Diane Duke in the FSC letter, which ICM says contains “a variety of erroneous statements that have been debated and refuted several times in the past seven years.”
Essentially, the ICM letter states that the FSC raises issues that have not only “been long asked and answered,” but also about which the ICANN Board had already decided should not be “reopened when it determined in Brussels to accept the finding of the IRP majority that ICM’s application had been approved by the Board as meeting the sponsorship criteria.”
Other points made in the letter:
• FSC is not and has never been “the” trade association for the global adult entertainment industry. “By way of contrast,” the letter reads, “IFFOR is of a global nature, and to date, ICM has received pre-registrations from over 9,000 members of the Sponsored Community from over 80 different countries.”
• The definition of the dot-XXX sponsored community has not changed in the nearly seven years since ICM submitted its application in March 2004.
• The materials posted to the ICANN site in support of the revised application “specify the Baseline IFFOR Policies in detail, and articulate the processes by which additional policies and procedures will be developed by its Policy Council.
• ICM’s pre-registration service was launched in May 2006, and “the assertion that webmasters were tricked into pre-reserving names by promises of any kind is completely unfounded.”
• The issue of sponsorship is not now on the table, “and under the IRP decision, accepted by the Board in Brussels, should not have been on the table at any time since June of 2005.”
• “The notion that either ICANN or the pubic has insufficient information regarding the .XXX sTLD, ICM Registry, or IFFOR is patently absurd.”
The letter concludes, “The bottom line is that the FSC’s comments simply restate the arguments they have made in the past. Their claims were inaccurate, unsupportable, untimely, and irrelevant when first made, and remain so today.”
The ICM letter can be read here.
