According to xBiz.com, IFFOR the non-profit which receives $1o from each registered .XXX domain name, has issued its first two grants, in the amount of $5,000 each.
IFFOR stands for International Foundation for Online Responsibility and as I said is funded by .XXX domain name registrations and renewals.
Each time a .XXX domain is registered or renewed IFFOR gets $10 of the registration or renewal fee paid to the registrar.
According to the last monthly report ICM, the operator of the .XXX registry filed with ICANN (September 2012) there just under 141,000 .XXX domain names registered (not counting the 10 year blocks) which would have generated over $1.4 million in fees for IFFOR for 2012.
Of course .XXX first renewals have now kicked in and although I haven’t seen any renewal stats we would expect that IFFOR would have now received in excess of $2.5 million in funding from .XXX registration and renewals.
Today IFFOR announced “”the first recipients of grants”" which were for “Two studies into online age verification and the abuse of newsgroups by those seeking child abuse images.
“Innovate Identity and the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) will both receive $5,000 to fund research that will look into key aspects of online responsibility and provide reports in the second quarter of this year that IFFOR expects will further policy discussions in these areas”.
“Innovate Identity is an independent consultancy that will use IFFOR’s grant to create a white paper on best practices used in the digital economy for assuring the age of individual Internet users”.
“Increasingly, there are both business advantages and legislative requirements around identifying the age of users, but doing so presents a complex policy issue where technical requirements need to be balanced with ease-of-use and privacy”.
“The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) will use its grant from IFFOR to complete its research into how online newsgroups are used by those seeking child abuse images”.
“Both these grants will enable cutting-edge research into issues of online responsibility,” IFFOR chairman Clyde Beattie said. “These two were chosen by the grant committee of the policy council from a group of six applications. They represent an opportunity to provide real value to policy decisions, the Internet, and gTLDs in the future.”
I have not heard of any other grants being issued by IFFOR since its inception.
TheDomains.com reached out to IFFOR chairman Mr. Beattie a few months ago and requested a detailed accounting of the funds it received.…