BRUSSELS – An online red-light district won a long battle Friday to set up a new .xxx Internet address after the global Internet oversight agency said it made mistakes in rejecting it three years ago.

The board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, says it will now start the process of registering “.xxx” by making checks on ICM Registry LLC, the company that wants to run it.

ICM’s founder Stuart Lawley says he thinks the new address could easily attract at least 500,000 sites, making it after “.mobi” the second biggest sponsored top-level domain name — or TLD, the name for Web address suffixes such as .com or .org.

Lawley expects to make $30 million a year in revenue by selling each .xxx site for $60 — and pledges to donate $10 from each sale to child protection initiatives via a nonprofit he has set up, the International Foundation for Online Responsibility, or IFFOR.

He already has 110,000 reservations, he says, and could get .xxx up and running within six to nine months after ICANN checks that ICM has the financial means and technical know-how to run it.

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BERLIN – Goldman Sachs may face claims for financial compensation from European governments and investors in connection with the fraud case brought against the investment bank by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Britain and Germany, whose governments had to bail out banks that lost money due to what the SEC says was Goldman’s misbehavior, are both looking into the case, while analysts say that lawsuits from investors — against Goldman and other banks that marketed complex mortgage-backed securities — are almost inevitable.

The German Finance Ministry, the government-owned KfW development bank and IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG, which the SEC says lost some $150 million in investments marketed by Goldman, all said Monday they are looking into the case and will not rule out any option.

“After checking all facts, the public domain will examine closely if there are any possibilities for compensation, but at this point it is too early to speculate about it,” Finance Ministry spokeswoman Jeanette Schwamberger told The Associated Press.

The U.S. charges against Goldman Sachs relate to a complex investment tied to the performance of pools of risky mortgages. In a complaint filed Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that Goldman marketed the package to investors without disclosing that the pools were picked by another client, a prominent hedge fund that wanted to bet the U.S. housing bubble would burst.

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