Domain Extensions For .porn And .adult Now Available

As of yesterday, the .porn and .adult domain names can be publicly registered by anyone.

ICM Registry, the company that has been running the .xxx domain for the last four years and have registered over 100,000 domain names with it, had two successful initial sunrise periods before. The extensions are now available for the general public.

According to TheDomains.com, no other company applied for either .porn nor .adult extensions, so ICM managed to buy both for a combined application fee of $370,000. On the sunrise periods alone, the company has banked over $1.2 million. ICM also owns the .sex extension, which should be available later this year.

“The whole point of the new domains is to allow people to easily remember website addresses and to have more convenient ones, rather than 20 or 30 characters, someone could have PalmBeach.dentist — or in our case something like Amateur.porn — rather than a very long name.” Stuart Lawley, ICM Registry CEO told Bloomberg. “Dot-com is rather cluttered with about 116 million registrations. This subject was talked about for many years within ICANN, the governing body of the Internet, and we’re just seeing this come to fruition now.”

There’s a general concern from non-porn-related brands and celebrities, who — given the blank canvas that the new domain names represent — could potentially face the threat of some serious trolling and exploitation of their names. In an interesting twist, this is actually making celebrities and private brands buy .porn or .xxx domains themselves, as a preemptive strike on possible trolls.

Almost 7,000 domain names had been registered before the public launch, and it’s assumed that a good chunk of those were done for brand protection reasons. Many of those websites are not expected to be used by their owners.

“Anyone that has intellectual property has to protect it. If there’s a new shopping mall and somebody opens a burger bar and sticks ‘McDonald’s’ over the top of it, then McDonald’s Corporation would have to do something about that.” Lawley added. “Really, this is like a shopping mall in cyberspace, and people can decide to pre-register using their trademarks — which they get first shot at taking a name — or they can deal with infringements after the events.”

Those who already own a .xxx domain have the right to register the matching .porn or .adult domains before general availability. After that, it’s every brand for themselves, guys.

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