Yahoo! gives in to Sex.com

Yahoo! has backed down over its threat to sue Grant Media, the owner of the Sex.com domain name. Yahoo! had accused the company of illegally redirecting users to the Sex.com portal.

However, Sex.com's owner Gary Kremen is standing by his intention to sue Yahoo! for bullying business practices.

Yahoo! had accused Grant Media of "tarnishing Yahoo!'s reputation" by running explicit content at the www.yahoo.sex.com URL. Yahoo! is particularly sensitive about such issues because it pledged in April to remove all adult content from all of its sites, in the wake of public pressure.

In response to Yahoo!'s action, Grant Media immediately fired off a retaliatory lawsuit, accusing Yahoo! of intimadatory business practices. In its defence, it explained the only reason the yahoo.sex.com domain name diverted to its site was because of a widely used web protocol that allows sites to take traffic that ends in their domain name.

The system - called the "wildcard DNS" protocol - is meant to protect domain name holders from surfers mis-typing URLs. Yahoo! accepted Grant Media's argument and has withdrew its lawsuit, saying it did not realise it was a Wildcard DNS issue.

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