Are universities wasting money regging .xxx names ?

The University of Colorado registered 27 .xxx names at $200 a piece. $5400 which could have been used for a partial scholarship for a deserving student, to fund an entrepreneurial micro start up, or one of many other causes.

They registered names like CU.xxx which I am not sure they are the first thing the public as a whole thinks of when they hear CU.

East Carolina University registered 8 .xxx names. Some that no squatter imo would have registered. Many univeristies have registered many .xxx names not just one.

The University of Michigan registered 21 .xxx domains and some make no sense to waste $200 on. michigananddifference.xxx, mgoblue.xxx and umich.xxx are three just three examples.

Interestingly their rival Michigan State took the same stance as the Univeristy of Illinois ( we wrote about here) and registered 0.

Are univeristies second class citizens ? Last month ICM suspended the registrations of names like BusinessWeek.xxx and VerizonWireless.xxx.

Now in all fairness some of these names were not trademarked. So the universities could not ask for ICM to suspend names like they did with BusinessWeek for example, but they could have at least got their trademarks blocked for free just like these companies got them blocked. I think Michigan State and Illinois took the right route.

Michigan registered 14 names at $200 and then went and got 7 more when they were free to register for anyone. Names like umich.xxx and leadersandbest.xxx were registered for $99.

A lot of these names would not have been used imo for porn, they may have got squatted but not developed sites. How do you protect it completely if someone wanted. Are you going to register CUfootball.xxx and MichiganCheerleaders.xxx and all the other combinations which go into the hundreds of possibilities ?

So what do you think ? Are universities wasting their money regging .xxx domains ?

Should they have gotten the same free ride VerizonWireless got ?

Written by RH