Is Your Portfolio Protected From Porn?

It really depends on how on-the-ball the corporate IT departments are of the companies you invest in.

Last week, the internet opened up for sale the .xxx domain, with the idea of allowing pornography websites a way to self-select themselves out of the general domain. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which governs the Internet's naming schemes, started selling the suffix on December 6. The .xxx naming system was approved last March. Setting aside the First Amendment issues (if the government were to make it mandatory) and the monopoly issues (only one corporation controls the licenses for the .xxx domains), and we have one additional issue: What is to stop a pornographer from using a "clean" domain name, but with the .xxx suffix? For example, what if some nefarious porn producer wanted to sell his wares under the site Disney.xxx? People looking for the Disney store might end up seeing more Ron Jeremy than Mickey Mouse. To protect themselves, companies and large institutions have been buying up their .xxx counterpart sites, spending what is essentially a minimal sum to squat on the rights of .xxx websites that could fall into the wrong hands. In the above example, www.Disney.xxx has already been purchased. Now, trademark and copyright law should suggest that people who grab a .xxx domain name for a company that is copyrighted will lose that domain name, if the company files a claim (and why wouldn't they?). But in the interim, that company would potentially expose its customers to the seedier side of the Internet. It is that thought that drove companies to pre-purchase their own .xxx domain names. I wanted to test out which companies were proactive and bought their domains, and which ones had slipped and not yet purchased those domains. For my subjects, I stuck to companies that consumers might look for online — essentially, retailers — that were on the larger end of market caps. I also looked at large, famous websites that are publicly traded companies (such as Google and Yahoo). To check, believe it or not, someone already has a website setup to investigate. The site,

, lets you investigate whether or not a certain .xxx domain is established. What I found is that, for all 25 companies, the domain name associated with the company was already reserved. Whether this was done by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (on behalf of what are all large corporations) or if all 25 happened to have savvy legal teams is unknown. What was disturbing is how easily I was able to spoof the websites and get to a .xxx domain name that would certainly be close enough to bring in some traffic. Listed below are the companies I looked at, along with the domain names (where applicable) that were available as of posting time of this article.

The wide availability of gimmicky websites with the .xxx suffix tells me that not enough top companies are taking seriously the possibility of their good name being appropriated — even temporarily — for porn purposes. While SOME might want to see bigmacs.com (god only knows what it'd be), I would have to assume McDonald's would be less than thrilled by the idea. Then again, some people like redheads...and Ronald is the ultimate red head.