The internet's red light district is set to go live later this year. While hospitality companies may have effective protective strategies in place for generic top-level domains (gTLDs), the registrants of .xxx domain names must provide online, sexually-orientated content. So to avoid embarrassment, hospitality companies may want to tweak their standard approach and take advantage of the mechanisms put in place by the ICM Registry to protect trademark owners not involved in the adult entertainment world:

  • At the beginning of a 30-day "Sunrise B" period, hospitality companies will be allowed to register defensive, non-resolving .xxx domains corresponding to their trademarks. "Sunrise B" would begin after a 30-day "Sunrise A" period during which adult entertainment companies get the first crack at reserving .xxx domain names.
  • Right now, hospitality companies can use a free, no-obligation preregistration service whereby specific .xxx domain names can be "prerequested." Those who preregister will be notified when formal registration begins and will receive specific forms, details and procedures for filing defensive registrations during the Sunrise B period.

 As the ICM Registry's FAQs don't provide dates for the beginning of either Sunrise period, preregistration would appear to be a sensible move. To test how easy this is, we preregistered www.hospitalitylawg.xxx at the ICM Registry "reservation page." We were greeted with this message:  

We are ac­cept­ing ex­pres­sions of in­ter­est from non mem­bers of the adult in­dus­try for non-re­solv­ing names for trade­mark and In­tel­lec­tual prop­erty pro­tec­tion. The[y] can be names you own in other TLDs or sim­ply strings that match your non adult in­dus­try trade­marks or per­sonal names

From there, we filled in one of the twenty www._________.xxx blanks, hit "sub­mit" and im­me­di­ately re­ceived our "Name Reser­va­tion Con­for­ma­tion."

Al­though spelling doesn't seem to be a strength, ICM has put to­gether a process that was quick and easy. We will keep you up­dated on how well pre­reg­is­tra­tion works.