Triple-x domain names go on general sale

Domain names ending in .xxx, designed for pornographic websites, went on sale to the general public today, the Washington Post reported.

The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved the new website suffix in March, the Washington Post reported. About 100,000 addresses have already been purchased in a restricted sale, with the first pages going live in September, BBC News reported.

"It has been 10 years in the coming and today the floodgates are open," Stuart Lawley, CEO of ICM Registry, which oversees the addresses, told BBC News. "We would hope that the number of domains sold will more than double very quickly.”

ICM Registry claims the .xxx sites will be safer than traditional pornography sites, because they will be scanned daily for malware, unlike .coms or .orgs, the Guardian reported.

However, two pornography companies, Manwin and Digital Playground, have sued ICANN and ICM for fostering anticompetitive practices with the new addresses.

ICM Registry charges an annual fee of about $60 per address, which the companies say is 10 times the fee charged for similar top-level domain names.

Lawley told BBC News that ICM Registry’s pricing "was comparable with other niche providers.” He added, "There are economies of scale here, bear in mind that .com sells 100 million names a year.”

Anti-porn groups like Morality in Media aren’t happy either, the Washington Post reported, since they expect .xxx to “increase, not decrease” access to pornographic websites.

More from GlobalPost: Triple-x hell for companies who don't pay to stop .xxx domain names