I fully support legal business endeavors; even ones I may not personally find appealing. Such is the case with an adult domain registration company, ICM Registation's claim to want to legitimize the adult industry by offering .xxx domain names with benefits (not those kind of benefits, but with enhanced security and better ways to process payments.)
I actually think it is a great idea to allow adult businesses exclusive access to a top level domain that helps them identify their industry -- if all "adult" sites were on .xxx domains it would be easier for search engines to exclude adult results in G-rated searches, and easier for the businesses to market their sites. There is a (free) membership request, an application process, and hundreds of dollars in fees to get a .xxx domain, and if your business is G-Rated, you cannot own one for the purpose of doing G-Rated business.
Whenever you see a website ending in .gov, you know the website is part of the government. When you see .edu, you think school or educational institution. I see no downside to having a top-level domain that instantly identifies a particular industry that is already treated differently by search engines anyhow.
But I object to ICM Registry (the agent whom you can reserve .xxx domains or request to become your own adult domain registrar through) attempting to masquerade its lucrative business efforts as a "service" to business owners and as an effort to increase credibility among the adult industry. I say this for two reasons:
- The outrageous fees involved to purchase a .xxx domain name and maintain it when compared to other top levels (i.e., .com, .info, etc.); and
- The even more outrageous "Sunrise B" application fee to block someone from taking your domain name and registering it as a .xxx name.
While the latter may sound like a worthwhile "safeguard investment" at only $199.99 it is anything but a safeguard. I have already received several emails from folks who have gotten scare-tactic emails strongly encouraging them to reserve their domain name now, or, surely, some adult shop keeper will register it and ruin your reputation.
I have news for ICM Registry and scammers sending letters: adult website owners are not stalking business owners and threatening to steal their domain names and hold them for ransom now, and they are not going to start doing it just because .xxx is now available. The folks who do that sort of thing are scammers and they are more likely to buy yourdomainname.biz (when you own the .com version) and threaten to sell it to a competitor if you do not buy it.
Before you pay $199.99 to "block" someone from registering your domain name as a .xxx domain, read my article, "Why Sunrise B Application to Block .xxx Domain Registration is a Scam ." You will learn that this fee is non-refundable, and how ICM specifically says if an adult industry business wants your domain and you have requested a block, they will favor the adult business and simply let you know of the possible infringement.
My article exposes how ICM will take your money to block registration and an adult business' application to use the same domain name (both are non-refundable) and side with the adult business request.
So why would anyone pay $199.99 simply to receive an email from ICM one day that says: "We are sorry, but we let someone else use your name to register a .xxx domain. You paid us $199.99 not to do that, so we thought you'd want to know in case you want to sue them now."
It’s a big scam also because:
ICM Registration sold hundreds of the top domains in august to big domain investors (not caring about trademarks).
ICM Registration has blocked 15000 popular keywords in many languages to auction them later, my domain too, i cant reserve/register it even having the trademark!
The industry will not use xxx domains just because are being bought by cibersquatters.
Great points! Thank you for sharing this information.
I personally think it goes way beyond the article above. I think that in today’s market with domain names being referred to as cyber real-estate that they are worth too much money to simply trust a registrar with a few students making a little over minimum wage to not skim some of the names off of the top once the general registration was opened. Note; the registration procedure was not in real time. We tried to buy names totally unrelated to the sex industry from domainmonster.com (rum.xxx and fight.xxx) only to find that they had coincidentally been bought by two separate people with the same last name at the same address through two separate registrars.
We contacted ICM and of course they weren’t interested as they would be implicating themselves for not properly screening the registrars and we contacted the new owners of the domain names who stated they batch bought the names for sex industry related projects – yea right! One has a better chance being struck by lightning. We are looking for others that have these same registrants sjow up when they tried to register their .xxx domains so we can nail their butts. We won’t mention our website name as that’s tacky but look around and you’ll find us if you think the same happened to you.
Thanks for the chance to rant!