C3 Patent and Intellectual Property Law

Oct262011 | Steve O'Donnell

XXX Domains. Should you care?

XXX top level domains are coming any minute now. Should you worry that your personal or business .com is going to be registered as a .xxx and someone is going to divert your visitors? Will your mom try to visit your personal blog and wind up watching weird porn, the kind you used to have to import directly from ex-Soviet bloc countries?

ICANN, the body that oversees our domain system has opened up registration of .xxx sites. I’m not sure if the impetus for that was so that it was even easier to find pornography on the internet, or if it was that this would make it easier for individuals (or governments) to block pornography. I don’t think it matters. I also don’t think anyone is particularly thrilled at the prospect of xxx domains. I understand the adult industry doesn’t like it because the new domains are more expensive that the usual .com and there is the concern that they’ll be rounded up and forced into the .xxx pigeonhole category.

One thing that has some people concerned is the possibility that pornographers are going to register known trademarks with a .xxx domain and divert internet traffic. I personally don’t see the problem. Even .net domains are second class internet citizens and other top level domains (TLDs) out there have been largely ignored by everyone. Sure, a few people registered different TLDs, for special effects, such as Delicio.us, or for .TV sites, but for the most part, they just haven’t caught on. Most internet marketing people will still tell you to rebrand if you can’t get the .com TLD.

Let’s say, just for fun, that you own pizzahut.com. What will happen if someone buys pizzahut.xxx and posts foot fetish videos? Probably nothing really, someone searching for pizza isn’t going to pull a porn site from Google or Bing. The content of the site is still going to drive search results, not just the name. Is it possible that someone could accidentally type in pizzahut.xxx instead of pizzahut.com? Sure, I guess it’s possible, that’s a pretty weird typo though. That person is probably just as likely to accidentally type in papajohns.com.

Also, registering pizzahut.xxx is a pretty obvious trademark problem, and if someone did try to do that, it could be recaptured by Pizza Hut without much bother.

Still I guess I can see why some people might want to shut down the possibility of someone registering the .xxx version of their trademarked site, so there is a way you can do that now. For the next few days you can file a reservation request with the ICM registry. If you’re interested, take a look at http://www.icmregistry.com/ (Sunrise B option). You’ll need a trademark to do this. You can also contact your favorite registrar. I’m sure any one will be happy to have your business. If you miss the time frame, you’ll likely be able to still register it later if you want.

Personally, I’m not worried about it, and I actually have some reason to be concerned.