Today is the day, .xxx sunrise begins. Here’s an offer we should all refuse:
Wanna protect your good name from having somebody erect a pornographic website on yourname.xxx?
Then fork over $300 and you’ll be “protected” against that happening for 10 years.
It’s called a non-adult sunrise blocking registration and the .xxx registry expects those of us who feel we have trademarks to protect to cough up the money for one.
It can also be called extortion and get used to it, because in one form or another every new Top Level Domain that trots itself out over the next few years is going to try this in one form or another until it stops working.
So if everybody wants to save a lot of time, energy and money the best course of action forward is to make it stop working now.
A few weeks ago I was invited to write a guest post on Domain Name News about the new Top Level Domain process and in it I posited that a buyer’s strike in defensive registrations was inevitable. (The word from within a hopeful Top Level Domain provider was that “Jeftovic has pissed off a lot of people inside the industry with that blog post of his…”) Before that I had also posted on my WebValueInvestor blog why most new TLDs will be failures and a waste of time.
When we discussed .XXX sunrise internally, the consensus was that we had a duty to offer the option to our members, which we are going to do. (We even asked some of our members who run adult websites and even they hate this new TLD and view it as blackmail).
With this in mind easyDNS will NOT be registering a .XXX blocking registration for itself.
Fsck that. It’s extortion, it sucks and we’re not going to play ball. If anybody is stupid enough to register easydns.xxx, we will view it as a bad faith registration that violates our trademark. As one of our lawyers was fond of closing his letters “Govern yourself accordingly”. We encourage all our members to take a similar tack, and if enough of us have our marks diluted by this crap, we should form a class action and go after the registry itself and perhaps invite ICANN to the proceedings.
So, how do you like the new TLD business model now?
If you actually want to go through with this, the pricing is as follows:
Sunrise A (for adult trademarks): $300
Sunrise B (for non-adult trademarks): $200
Sunrise B (blocking registration 10 years): $300
Landrush: we aren’t going to support landrush because we detest new TLD landrushes. Ask us in six-months (if you aren’t too busy filing sunrise claims in 20 other new TLDs)
If you actually want to do this (did we mention we’re recommending against it?) then email support with your contact info and trademark data and we’ll get it rolling.
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