Later this year pornography providers will have a new top-level domain, .xxx. Hoping to avoid the unfortunate situation like with WhiteHouse.com, which used to go to a porn site, many colleges and universities are apparently buying up some potentially troublesome URLs.
According to a piece by Tim Barker in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
There are some eye-opening names being registered. Among them: washu.xxx and mizzou.xxx. Don’t, however, expect to find naked co-eds at either of these sites. In what amounts to a defensive maneuver, schools across the nation are snapping up the .xxx domain names that match their federally registered trademarks. It’s simply a matter of trying to keep them out of the wrong hands.
“We don’t want someone coming across our trademark on a porn site. God only knows what they’d come up with,” said Terry Robb, director of information technology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, which also has registered missouri.xxx and missouritigers.xxx.
It’s unclear if this effort is to preclude someone from actually creating a porn site that looks suspiciously like the URL for Washington University in St. Louis , or if it’s to stop someone from just buying the domain name and then forcing Wash U. to buy it back at an exorbitant price.
