The University of Kansas is buying up Web site names such as www.KUgirls.xxx and www.KUnurses.xxx, but not because it is planning a Hot Babes of Kansas site.
Instead, the university and countless other schools and businesses are rushing to prevent their good names from falling into the hands of the pornography industry. Over the past two months, they have snapped up tens of thousands of “.xxx” Web site names that could be exploited by the adult entertainment business.
“Down the road there’s no way we can predict what some unscrupulous entrepreneur might come up with,” University of Kansas trademark licensing director Paul Vander Tuig said.
The university spent nearly US$3,000 in all. It plans to sit on the .xxx names and do nothing with them.
The brand-new .xxx suffix is an adults-only variation on .com. The .xxx name went on sale to the public for the first time this week, promoted as a way to enable porn sites to distinguish themselves and a means of making it easier for Internet filters to screen out things parents do not want their children to see.
ICM Registry of Palm Beach, Florida, is the exclusive manager of the .xxx names and sells them through a dozen middleman companies, such as GoDaddy.com, for an average of US$100 a year.
Indiana University spokesman Mark Land said the school spent US$2,200 to buy www.hoosiers.xxx and 10 other such names. Other Indiana schools took the same step, including Purdue University and Ball State University.
“This is just a modest cost of doing business in the world we live in,” Land said.
ICM sold .xxx names for the past two months exclusively to companies and others that wanted to protect their brands from the porn industry. During the so-called sunrise sale, ICM registered nearly 80,000 names, chairman and chief executive Stuart Lawley said.
A search of ICM’s database finds prominent brand names — including Nike.xxx, Pepsi.xxx and Target.xxx — among those purchased.
“Target has applied to block a number of the .xxx domains that correspond with our registered trademarks,” said Lee Henderson, a spokesman for the -Minneapolis-based store chain.
“We do not plan to use the domains,” he added, dryly.
The Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers, which the US government established in 1998 to run the Internet’s address system, authorized creation of .xxx earlier this year.
The strongest opposition to the suffix has come from the adult entertainment industry.
The Free Speech Coalition, the industry’s trade group, lobbied against its creation, complaining among other things about the registration fees.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
RSS