Brands saying no, no, no to .XXX

The new .XXX domains officially became available for registration earlier this week and brand experts were quick to encourage businesses to block their trademarks from being registered under the latest gTLD (generic top-level domain).

As Wikipedia explains, the .XXX domains have been introduced for websites containing sexually explicit material, proposed as a tool for dealing with the conflict between those who wish to provide and access such material through the Internet, and those who wish to prevent access to it, either by children and adolescents, or by employees at their workplaces. A seemingly sensible idea, probably most would agree, however, as with most internet innovations, there always has to be some negatively, scepticism or scare-mongering.

This time round, businesses are being frightening into thinking that unruly cybersquatters are chomping at the bit to register their company name or numerous versions of it with an .XXX domain, meaning customers could try to Google them and end up with a dodgy porn site! Perhaps this problem may be a bigger concern for certain brands over others, Candy (white goods), Pussy (energy drinks) and Dirty Dog (sunglasses) and of course numerous celebrity names come to mind. I suspect that businesses with less provocative titles needn’t be kept awake at night.

For any marketing bosses keen to prevent any chance of an internet rogue registering their company’s name as a “dot triple X”, you can do so for a cost of £199.99. The blocks are expected to last forever and are being advertised as permanent, but because ICM’s registry agreement with ICANN only lasts for 10 years, it can only guarantee the blocks for that amount of time. Another issue with the blocks is that you can only ban the actual trademark name, so for example Lego could block Lego.XXX but not Legoporn.XXX. So is it really worth the effort and expense? Probably more so for some brands over others, I’ll leave you to decide either way.