Porn moved tantalisingly close to being housed on dedicated .xxx web addresses as internet regulators admitted past mistakes and greenlighted an online revolution also extending to Chinese-script domain names.
The chairman of the global body that manages domain names, Peter Dengate Thrush, said that the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) "voted to begin contract negotiations" over the coming weeks.
The decision "does not mean that the .xxx application has been approved, it means we are returning to negotiations with the applicant."
ICM Registry, a company which registers domain names, applied for the .xxx domain in 2004 as a home for the adult entertainment industry, but saw its application rejected by ICANN in 2007.
Dengate Thrush said that the "board accepted" now that it had "got it wrong" after just two abstentions among its 15 voters.
The application was rejected on the grounds it did not meet requirements that the domain name was for "sponsored community" websites, not, he insisted, on any issues of public order or morality.
"We're not in the content business, that is up to governments and others," he said.
"We're about providing a safe arena," he said, adding that: "As long as they don't damage relations with the internet, our job is done."
The decision to reject the original ICM application was overturned in February by an independent review panel.
ICM Registry's chairman, Stuart Lawley, told AFP after the ruling that he would now engage in "a couple of weeks of due diligence," checking up on technical and financial promises, then spend "another few weeks" negotiating the contract.
Once Lawley obtains the .xxx domain names, he will sell them at $60 a time - he says he has 112,000 buyers already pre-registered, almost exclusively existing internet porn providers, and expects to sell "up to half a million" in total.
He predicted annual revenue of "$30 million a year."
Among conditions he says he will meet is a promise to "fund child protection initiatives," and ensure buyers "adhere to a published code of conduct with better filtering to police child access." Although ICANN was not addressing these arguments directly, those who have opposed the move in the past, namely US authorities, amid lobbying from conservative groups and church organisations, feared it will accelerate a rush to normalise porn usage.
Supporters of the .xxx domain name have argued that grouping the adult entertainment industry under a single banner will make it easier to police and market porn sites that conform to legal standards across different regulatory regimes.
The other main change voted through in Brussels was to give millions of Chinese language users internet access using Chinese script.
"One fifth of the world speaks Chinese and that means we just increased the potential online accessibility for roughly a billion people," added Rod Beckstrom, ICANN chief executive officer.
Others "in the pipeline" include the Palestinian territories among a clutch of Arabic applicants, plus Singapore and Thailand.
A California-based non-profit corporation, ICANN manages the Domain Name System and Internet Protocol addresses that form the technical backbone of the web. It next meets in Colombia in December.