What’s The Point In “Protecting Your Brand” If .XXX Registry ICM Is Just Going To Do It For You?

Maybe I missed something, but after the onslaught of advertising encouraging companies to “protect their brand”  leading up to the .XXX landrush, I’m a little bit perplexed by ICM’s actions as announced last week in their press release. For those that missed it, here is part of the release…

“ICM Registry, the official registry of the new .xxx top-level domain TLD, announced that as part of its investigation of reported cybersquatting by a handful of individuals, it has suspended registrations that appear to involve unmistakable, blatant cyber-squatting in violation of the Registry’s policies and the Registry-Registrant agreement. The suspended registrations include patterns of abusive registrations for names like businessweek.xxx, cnbc.xxx, geocities.xxx, nextag.xxx, snapfish.xxx, verizonwireless.xxx, washingtonpost.xxx, and gayroom.xxx, amongst others.”

So, what was the point in “protecting your brand”? Business Week didn’t, Verizon Wireless didn’t either…but due to ICM’s desire to do the right thing and protect  from “unmistakable, blatant cyber-squatting”, companies that didn’t bother protecting their brands are protected anyways.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for registries taking action like this. However, it’s hard to not find this action just a bit hypocritical. ICM, along with several registrars, spent a lot of money and efforts to scare companies and universities into buying .XXX domains by creating the fear that if they didn’t, anybody could and use the domains in any way they wanted, even to post porn on the .XXX version of their trademarked name.  We now see that’s not the case and that a lot of companies and universities wasted a lot of money by buying into the fear that was marketed to them.

The big question now is how will the actions to openly protect trademarks by ICM affect renewal rates for their .XXX domains? There will certainly be companies that take note and decide not to spend the money to renew knowing that ICM will step in to protect their name if someone is blatantly cyber-squatting on it.

Again, I give props to ICM for doing the right thing and protecting companies from cyber-squatting. However, I can’t say I agree with scaring so many companies into purchasing .XXX domains on the grounds that any Joe-Schmo would be able to cyber-squat on a company’s name if the company didn’t pay the minimum $100 (much more in Sunrise) to register. Since ICM is doing the right thing, it might bite them next year at renewal time, only time will tell. If it does, I certainly won’t feel sorry for them, since I feel they took advantage of unsuspecting companies and used fear to make a quick buck. No matter how you think about it, ICM pulled a quick one on the people they do business with. It’s not good for the industry, and quite simply, it’s just not good business.