ICM Registry Getting Into Bed With Domainers?

Is ICM Registry trying to win over domainers?

According to an announcement earlier this afternoon ICM will be the overall Diamond Sponsor for T.R.A.F.F.I.C in October.

The event’s organiser, Rick Schwartz, obviously expects some negative backlash from the announcement as in his email he states:

We know this may be met with some amount of controversy but you can’t stop progress and expansion. You can’t dictate everything in business. There will be no nudity or anything else not 100% suitable for a business environment.

This comes only a few days after the first official .xxx sites and domains under their “founders” program started going live and it emerged that Frank Schilling had invested heavily in .xxx.

Of course any domain extension that wants to get their numbers up will probably want to have domain investors on their side, but getting the balance right is always going to be an issue. If the bulk of a namespace is made up of “investments” then there is a real risk for both the registry and the investors.

I guess we’ll know more about how this pans out post-launch..