To thwart porn, colleges are buying up .xxx sites
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — The University of Kansas is buying up website names such as www.KUgirls.xxx and www.KUnurses.xxx. But not because it's planning a Hot Babes of Kansas site or an X-rated gallery of the Nude Girls of the Land of Aaahs.
Context & Ripple Effects
ICANN approved the .xxx top-level domain back in March 2011 after years of wrangling (the xxx domain approval), and the registry opened the floodgates this week with more than 100,000 names going live December 6 (over 100,000 xxx domains going live). The University of Kansas buying KUgirls.xxx and KUnurses.xxx is the first visible defensive response from a major brand owner.
The logic traces to the domain market's history: Porn.com fetched $9 million in a 2007 sale (Porn.com's $9 million sale), so a university name paired with '.xxx' is exactly the kind of asset a squatter could monetize or use for brand damage. KU is paying registration fees now to avoid a costlier takedown fight later.
First-order effects
- The University of Kansas takes on a recurring defensive-registration expense across its name variants, trading cash today for protection against porn sites trading on its brand.
- Trademark owners watching the 100,000-name launch now face the same decision KU just made: register defensively or risk a squatter holding the name.
Second-order effects
- The .xxx registry collects revenue from buyers who never intend to use the names, making defensive purchases by universities and brands a profit line rather than a side effect.
- Domain speculators can price adult-oriented brand variants against institutions' willingness to pay, since a public university has strong incentives to settle rather than litigate over an embarrassing URL.
Third-order effects
- If every new top-level domain triggers a wave of defensive registrations, brand protection becomes a standing budget item for universities, sports leagues, and consumer companies — a structural tax on each expansion of the domain namespace.
- The pattern pressures registries and ICANN toward sunrise-period trademark protections as standard, since unmanaged launches hand leverage to squatters at brands' expense.
The trend: Each expansion of the domain-name system converts brand defense into a recurring registration cost, with .xxx as the template case.