Why You Don’t Need to Buy an XXX Domain

The XXX domain is live. Many companies are opposed to the concept of the XXX domain and consider it to border on extortion, requiring them to acquire the XXX domain just to protect their brands. The truth is, there really is no need.

So, do businesses like Nike and Microsoft need to rush out and get an XXX domain? What will happen when someone visits toyota.xxx and finds some weird sex fetish site? Well, there are two reasons that businesses not in the adult industry need not be concerned with XXX domains.

Established businesses and retail chains—especially businesses like Nike, Microsoft, and Toyota—have copyright and trademark laws on their side. If a microsoft.xxx domain does appear, Microsoft could likely squash it through legal action. If the site dared to even remotely mimic the official Microsoft site, or appear in any way to suggest it was connected with the actual Microsoft, it would be a slam-dunk.

That brings us to the second reason. Visiting an XXX domain will take conscious intent. If you just type a domain name in a browser and hit “Enter”, it will default to the COM domain in most cases. In order for someone to visit microsoft.xxx or nike.xxx, they would have to actually type the whole URL. Anyone who does so knows full well what sort of content to expect as a result, and won’t have his or her opinion swayed regarding the brand reputation of its namesake.

The reality is that the only companies that really need to buy an XXX domain to protect their reputation are businesses with adult entertainment websites. No sane or rational person is going to “accidentally” visit mcdonalds.xxx or amazon.xxx and attribute whatever content they stumble on to the real McDonald’s or Amazon. The same cannot be said, though, for online adult entertainment entities.

Companies like Adam & Eve, Vivid, Playboy, and others currently operate COM domains, as they should—they are commercial businesses. Because of the industry they operate in, though, they are more or less forced to protect their brand reputation by purchasing the equivalent XXX domain. A person who lands at vivid.xxx instead of vivid.com might reasonably assume them to be one and the same.

The XXX domain is sort of silly, really. Established adult entertainment sites are not going to abandon COM domains, so the mainstream Internet won’t get “cleaned up.” But, the flip side of that coin is that mainstream businesses don’t need to worry about XXX domains because nobody is going to accidentally visit a XXX site and assume that the company has “branched out”.