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UI won't go triple-X in domain names

Christine Des Garennes, 12/26/2011

Other schools are registering special new domain names to protect brands from adult-oriented enterprises

Unless you like receiving cease-and-desist letters from the University of Illinois' legal team, don't even think about launching a website like universityofillinois.xxx to sell or promote, ahem, adult entertainment or anything else.

Same goes for FightingIllini.xxx, or other similar UI-related sites.

It's been open season on .xxx domain names since ICM Registry of Florida started making the domains available for registration this month. Earlier this fall, companies and institutions wanting to protect their trademarks were given the opportunity to register their names before the rest of the public was allowed to do so.

Some colleges and universities, such as Illinois State University and Parkland College, have responded by registering .xxx names to protect their brands from the adult entertainment industry. But not all of them have taken the approach of buying up .xxx domain names.

"We decided that was not an effective strategy," said Mike Corn, the UI's chief information security officer. "If someone is misrepresenting themselves ... we can still approach them on trademark violations," he said.

Corn said university staff started discussing options about a year ago. ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which manages domains such as .com, .org, .edu, approved the new .xxx earlier this year. The proposal had been in the works for several years.

The thinking at the UI was people could register Illinigirls.xxx, HotIllinicoeds.xxx or any number of UI or Illini sites.

"Ultimately we decided not to register any. Primarily because there's no way to anticipate what people are going to register. ... Are we really going to think of 50 of them and register them?" he said.

Corn called such activity a "fool's errand."

Plus, if you consider paying annual registrations for 50 or 100 domains, the cost can add up, he said.

Over at Parkland College, staff are in the process of registering one site: parkland.xxx.

Patty Lehn, the college's director of marketing and public relations, estimated the cost at $80 and worth it.

"We certainly want to protect our brand," she said.

In September, Illinois State University registered several names with the .xxx suffix and then followed-up with registering a few additional names earlier this month. The site names include, for example, goredbirds.xxx, isu.xxx (Idaho State was the first to get the .edu domain), wglt.xxx (the name of the college radio station) and several others.

"It keeps someone from using our brand," said Mark Walbert, ISU's chief technology officer.

The amount ISU spent on domain registrations this year was up from previous year, totaling about $3,000, Walbert estimated, but he said he felt it was a preemptive move to avoid dealing with legal issues (and legal costs) later.

The UI registers a fair number of domains, such as the current illinois.edu and its predecessor, uiuc.edu. There are a slew of others it manages, for the alumni association and for academic journals based on campus. Corn estimated the number at over 200.

"We do have people who have cybersquatted or pretended to be us," Corn said. If the university contacts the firm directly or through its lawyers, "they'll stop it."

news-gazette.com

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U. of Illinois says no to buying .xxx domain names

Associated Press December 26, 2011

CHAMPAIGN, Ill.— The University of Illinois won't be buying Internet domain names with the suffix `.xxx,' but that doesn't mean you should.

Many universities are snapping up the newly available domain names to keep them out of the hands of pornographers. Southern Illinois University has purchased siu.xxx, southernillinois.xxx and saluki.xxx.

But the (Champaign) News-Gazette reports (http://bit.ly/rquYJ8) that Illinois administrators have decided not to purchase fightingillini.xxx or other Illini-themed domains. Their reasoning is it's impossible to think of -- and purchase -- every name with a connection to the university.

Chief information security officer Mike Corn says the school will instead threaten cyber-squatters with legal action. University lawyers will send cease-and-desist letters to anyone it feels is violating trademarks.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-il-illinois-xxxdomai,0,4708516.story

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Your Brand Name in Porn:
.XXX and the New Internet Frontier Hides A Naked Truth

Deanna Gillen

Jenna Jameson meet the Vatican?

Earlier this month, more than 100,000 websites went live using the .xxx domain name, a new internet designigation for legitimate porn sites worldwide. What was once only reserved for seedy magazines, gentleman’s clubs on the highway, and the naughty section in the rental store has made it big, and can now easily be found at an address bar near you. Now, you can type in virtually anything in front of a .xxx name and you’ll be taken to a porn site. Think "naked.xxx," "porn.xxx" or, as Reuters had originally reported, even "Vatican.xxx."

According to the International Corportation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the .xxx domain name was approved in March of last year in an effort to offer a “responsible alternative” for sites that provide adult content, since it clearly identifies the kind of site that users can expect to see when they click on a link. While the idea to keep content-sensitive material, like pornography, in its own hub is a good idea in theory, it makes access to this material even easier for the average user (even children). That, coupled with the fact that virtually anything can have .xxx domain name, could potentially be harmful to an individual or organization as broad as the Catholic Church.

The debate over this new domain has been vehement, but there has been heavy criticism on all sides (even within the porn industry). Anti-porn groups argue that this new domain will increase the availability of pornographic sites, while groups like Manwin and Digital Playground, two of the largest pornographic companies, are calling foul on the domain, saying the high price for the domains — 17 times the cost of an average domain — are anti-competitive. While there are some that applaud the new domain, the main consensus is that the .xxx frontier will do more harm than good.

As a spokesman for Manwin explained, “‘The fees for .xxx are unacceptably high and creating the domain name forces ‘defensive registrations,’ where copyright holders have to register an .xxx site ‘to keep cyber-squatters from exploiting those names.’”

An example of cyber-squatting was the recent Newtgingrich.com prank, in which the URL redirected users to one of a number of other pages highlighting the GOP presidential candidate’s follies, including an article citing "Gingrich 'Inadvertently' Names Porn Company 'Entrepreneur of the Year' For Stimulating the Economy." Likewise, early in the 1990s, school children were shocked when they searched “whitehouse.com,” and were greeted with none other than explicit content. And I don’t mean Bill Clinton.

The domain is even affecting state institutions like major universities. In an effort to squash the potential gains one pornographer could benefit from by scooping up a domain like PennStateGirls.xxx, Colorado.xxx, or the like, schools nationwide are in a frenzy to buy the domain at a premium before someone else gets there first. That is why schools like Kansas University are buying these addresses at $200 a pop, to make sure that these domains never come to fruition.

Which then brings us to the issue of the Vatican.

Earlier this week, news broke that the Vatican had lost its bid for the domain of Vatican.xxx, and that the domain had been reserved for pornographic content.

As Rev. Federico Lombardi, a spokesman for the Holy See, reported, “This domain is not available because it has been acquired by someone else.”

But as fate would have it, that was not actually the case. The ICM registry, the bureau responsible for the .xxx launch, had put the Vatican on the socially sensitive list, and had reserved the domain, but for no one in particular. ICANN had required ICM to work with a governmental advisory committee, to oversee a list of names on the reserve list – ranging from political leaders to singers.

While the ICM Registry developed the domain to provide a compromise between those who wish to access pornographic material and those who wish to block it, the list of possible domain names is infinite, and makes the censorship of harmful sites that much more difficult as the domain grows.

While the idea of an easily blockable domain is good, in theory, it does not hold up in the hyper-sensitive internet stream of this day and age. Let’s preserve the internet, and not corrupt it further with the dot xxx.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/3054/your-brand-name-in-porn-xxx-and-the-new-internet-frontier-hides-a-naked-truth