Written by With a plethora of top level domain addresses to choose from, the newest member to the group has been turning heads and raising eyebrows. .xxx domain addresses will be available to the general public on December 6, 2011 however, the “sunrise period” which is a time frame that allows trademark owners to register their names prior to public release started on September 7, 2011. Many business owners, entrepreneurs, and other individuals have been snapping these domains up during this period, but not necessarily because they all want to get into the adult entertainment industry.
“We don’t want someone coming across our trademark on a porn site. God only knows what they’d come up with,” said Terry Robb, director of information technology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Hundreds of other businesses, schools and non-profit organizations feel the same way, and have been registering their domain names for the new address in order to protect their trademarks from rated-X infringement. Most of these preregistered domain names will simply be pointed to the better known .com, .net, or .edu domain addresses that have already been used for decades.
Preregistration costs about $200 per domain name which most say is a small price to pay to protect a registered trademark in today’s age of information. The new .xxx domain address is supposedly targeted to companies and individuals who offer pornographic services, a move that some say is an under-handed way to make these websites easier to block using web-page filtering software.Once this top level domain address is available to the public, a big question will arise for trademark owners: will they be able to keep their domain names Safe for Work?
More information on preregistration can be found at http://about.xxx/.
