By: Raymond Hackney
Bloomberg is out with a piece today about how .xxx is a look into how corporations and other brands will have to protect themselves when new gtlds are available.
From the article:
Harvard University paid as much as
$299 to register the last time the World Wide Web’s global
overseer added a domain name to familiar ones including .com
and .net. Rather than seeking a new opportunity, it signed up to
keep harvard.xxx from being used as a porn site.
As the Internet’s first major expansion since 2004 adds
suffixes including .fail and .sex to the existing 22 names to
the right of the dot, brand owners such as Coca-Cola Co. (KO) and
Ford Motor Co. (F) may be similarly forced to pay up to prevent
cybersquatting on a massive scale, said Daniel Jaffe, executive
vice president of the Association of National Advertisers, a
trade group whose members wield 10,000 brands.
The article goes into brand protection,trademark violations, and things such as scam opportunities. The writer did speak to Stuart Lawley from ICM Registry/.XXX and Josh Bourne from FairWinds Partners who laid out examples of which extensions brands will have to be defensive about.