Sex and greed in DNS

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The new .XXX top-level-domain is coming on line later this year. Apparently the organizers of the domain are having a hard time convincing the porn industry to get on-board.

Most left feeling like there were few reasons to buy a .XXX domain other than in self-defense - which may whisper the future of what an unlimited number of vanity gTLDs will look like.

I totally agree. Back on March 28th, 2007 I said this regarding this very TLD:

Which is very true. They won't be reaping the big bucks by signing over the seamy side of the internet, they'll be making the big bucks from reputation protection buys from the likes of us. Higher Education domains like ours, WWU.EDU, are PRIME PICKINGS for .XXX. You can fully imagine that "WWU.XXX" will be full of ***Hot CoEd Action***, if we don't get it first. So you can further guarantee that our Telecom group will dilligently pick up "WWU.XXX" in order to maintain our reputation. So whoever is granted the authority to register ".XXX" domains will be getting our money, and most other .EDU domains as well.

That's what the gold-rush of the now wide open gTLD system looks like to organizations with a brand to protect. As it happens, WWU is also sensitive to alcohol consumption by students, so a hypothetical "WWU.BEER" would be yet another defensive buy on the part of the University. Each new TLD that comes up will have to be vetted by trademark and copyright owners to determine if a defensive buy is in order to protect their brandname.

2 Comments

Good point. But i beleive domain names are becoming more and more irrelevant nowdays. Most future versions of browsers will not display the address bar by default, that goes to tell you that instead of typing, you search and i can't imagine wwu.xxx will be in results when you search wwu.