Businesses urged to snap up unfavourable domain names

Companies following in the footsteps of Microsoft and Taylor Swift by buying unfavourable TLDs before internet trolls do.

Businesses should act fast to register new top level domain (TDL) addresses before they become widely available in June of this year, according to web hosting company 34SP.com.

On 1 June 2015 the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is making a raft of new TLDs available. They include .porn, .adult and .sucks. The reasoning behind the move is to make adult or trolling sites easier to monitor.

The TLDs .porn and .adult carry a base-level cost of £66 – but prices can go as high as £1,674 for one singe domain. The latest group of names to be released takes the available domains up to 550 – up from just 22 in 2011.

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Microsoft has already acted on the news. The tech giant has registered office.porn and office.adult ahead of 1 June, when they will become available to the public. Pop singer Taylor Swift has also taken proactive steps by buying taylorswift.porn and taylorswift.adult.

34SP.com co-founder and technical director Daniel Foster predicts many businesses will follow suit before 1 June. He has urged others to do the same to “avoid being associated with negative messages”.

“It’s hard to imagine domain names like .sucks and .porn will foster positivity,” he warned. “Clearly some big brands are already taking this seriously by registering controversial names while we are still in a mandated period.

“However, after 1 June it becomes a free for all, so I’d advise all businesses with even a slight worry about how this could affect their business to swoop up the domains sooner rather than later.”

There will be a variety of reasons for people registering the new domains, according to Foster. But, this being the internet, not all of them will be positive.

“While some might use domains for good causes, by creating sites such as cancer.sucks for example, I’d predict that many will be swooping up the new names solely for defamatory purposes.”

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Praseeda Nair

Praseeda Nair

Praseeda was Editor for GrowthBusiness.co.uk from 2016 to 2018.

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