by Hunter Patterson | Nov 18, 2011 | News Slider
The Internet is changing…sort of. Earlier this year one of the biggest blogging sites, Tumblr, starting adding the infinite sign to the beginning of its URLs because it had ran out of numbers. Now, the Internet is adding domains with the suffix “.xxx” specifically for pornographic sites. The change has sparked universities across the nation to buy up their respective domains, protecting their names from being tarnished. The URLs are coming cheap now, too. Both Vanderbilt and the University of Tennessee and Knoxville bought their addresses for less than $200 each. Vanderbilt registered “vanderbilt.xxx” and four other domain names: “commodores.xxx,” “vandy.xxx,” “vanderbiltuniversity.xxx” and “vanderbiltcommodores.xxx.” Not Lipscomb, though. Other schools and big businesses are buying up the domains quickly, sparking the launch of the .xxx top-level domain. The domains will become available to public within the next month. Per usual, though, those with trademarks got the first chance to purchase the URLs and safeguard them. Lipscomb has decided not to purchase the domains, no matter the price, because the “.xxx domain is intended for material that is counter to any university’s mission,” said Kim Chaudoin, director of university communication and marketing at LU. Chaudoin said there are two schools of thought among institutions of higher education. “One is that an institution would reserve the domain to protect its trademark and brand identity,” she said. The other is that the domain is not intended for the university and does not represent what the university was founded upon. Vanderbilt would be in the first school of thought. Maggie Huckaba, the university’s diretor of trademark licensing, told The Tennessean Vanderbilt wanted to trademark...
