XXX domain name blocking begins with schools
It's not tough to imagine why schools across the country would be blocking out student access to the newly minted .XXX domain name environment, especially since such a set of three letters defines only one thing: sex — imagine our surprise then when these same schools started purchasing domain names with the triple-X title attached to their own names and sports teams! It's not nefarious at all though, as it turns out, as groups like the University of Kansas have picked up kansas.xxx and rockchalkjayhawk.xxx and jayhawks.xxx in order to deflect porn-minded individuals from owning them themselves. This all started two months ago with ICM Registry offering trademark holders the opportunity to pay $200 per URL for a one-time block that would assure these owners that their names would not be used to promote pornography.
Seems sort of like a scheme of devilish proportions when it comes down to it then, doesn't it, when you've got a brand new service for sale that you "allow" people to purchase to protect themselves? In reality though what's happened is that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers approved the .XXX domain inside 2011 after ICM Registry originally submitted a proposal in 2000. This situation is essentially no different from each other time a domain name family is approved for sales by domain name dealers, it's just that the adult-themed nature of this combination of three letters makes the situation much more high profile. ICM Registry CEO Stuart Lawley noted the following on the situation:
"[The .XXX domain name exists] to clearly signpost adult entertainment on the Net. For those people who want to find adult content, they can easily find it, and for those who wish to avoid this kind of content, not only can you see that it has the .xxx as a suffix visibly ... parents can set their browser settings at home and on mobile devices to filter this content out automatically." – Lawley
For those of you with businesses in a position to get wrapped up in this situation, will you end up picking up your own .XXX domain, or will you let it fly to the devils? This domain name suffix is not quite as inexpensive as your .COM, your .US, or even your .NET names out there, so you'll have to weigh against the dollars and cents you'll have to drop in addition to working to block yourself to safety. Will you shield your brand from porn?
[via USA Today]