The Internet is changing…sort of. Earlier this year one of the biggest blogging sites, Tumblr, starting adding the infinite sign to the beginning of its URLs because it had ran out of numbers. Now, the Internet is adding domains with the suffix “.xxx” specifically for pornographic sites.
The change has sparked universities across the nation to buy up their respective domains, protecting their names from being tarnished. The URLs are coming cheap now, too. Both Vanderbilt and the University of Tennessee and Knoxville bought their addresses for less than $200 each. Vanderbilt registered “vanderbilt.xxx” and four other domain names: “commodores.xxx,” “vandy.xxx,” “vanderbiltuniversity.xxx” and “vanderbiltcommodores.xxx.”
Not Lipscomb, though.
Other schools and big businesses are buying up the domains quickly, sparking the launch of the .xxx top-level domain. The domains will become available to public within the next month. Per usual, though, those with trademarks got the first chance to purchase the URLs and safeguard them.
Lipscomb has decided not to purchase the domains, no matter the price, because the “.xxx domain is intended for material that is counter to any university’s mission,” said Kim Chaudoin, director of university communication and marketing at LU.
Chaudoin said there are two schools of thought among institutions of higher education.
“One is that an institution would reserve the domain to protect its trademark and brand identity,” she said. The other is that the domain is not intended for the university and does not represent what the university was founded upon.
Vanderbilt would be in the first school of thought. Maggie Huckaba, the university’s diretor of trademark licensing, told The Tennessean Vanderbilt wanted to trademark its sites because when one sees the .xxx domain, the first thing that comes to mind is pornography.
Usually, when a trademarked brand does something like this, the .xxx suffix redirects the user to the actual site or it will be a dead page.
The University of Tennessee-Knoxville paid $125 to $200 each for “tennesseevolunteers.xxx”, “bigorangecountry.xxx” and several other similar site names, and it plans to acquire more later, UT’s marketing director Michael Keener told The Tennessean. The acquisitions are worth it because it’s usually more expensive to later obtain the name from a domain prospector or take down an unauthorized site, he said.
Keener also mentioned that he thought every school in the SEC would be buying the domain names.
Chaudoin says that Lipscomb University chose not to incur the $125 fee and use the money elsewhere.
“We believe strongly that our audiences know who we are, what our mission is and that content on a domain such as this would not be an officially sanctioned university site.”