Manwin Licensing International SARL, a major company in the pornography world that represents such companies as YouPorn, Playboy Enterprises, Inc and Digital Playground, has filed a lawsuit against ICM Registry LLC, claiming this new .XXX domain promotes “monopolistic conduct, price gouging, and anticompetitive and unfair practices.”

We're pretty sure that's what we've been saying all along. Oh wait! No, we just simplified it and called it extortion.

Just in case you're not in the know, here's the skinny.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN), which was established with the help of the government to regulate domains and IPs, decided to make a high level domain suffix just for the porn companies (.xxx) for a number of reasons, not the least of which is to make blocking adult sites easier. From there, they sold the rights to the .xxx domain to ICM Registry LLC, which promptly began the process of warding off angry porn moguls. The Supreme Court let the domain go through, and ICM started charging adult companies tens of thousands of dollars (for some) just to reserve their trademarked names on the .xxx domain.

Back in July, Hustler announced that they would sue ICM if they continued their practice of forcing companies to pay to protect trademarked names they've already paid to protect. But ICM is rambling about domain squatters and best practices and says they cannot be sued.

Kevin Gaut, an attorney representing Manwin, disagrees and is calling ICM's practices, “an unnecessary cost on everybody, without any benefit for the adult entertainment community.”