the bblog

thank you, .xxx

Something amusing one of my eagle-eyed readers spotted: the about page for the new .xxx TLD has a banner image with a couple example domains on it.

Wait a minute. What's that domain right there?

Oh boy. Glad to see my name has joined the hallowed company of "milf", "nude" and "gays" as "extremely stereotypical porn keywords."

Now, I didn't bother registering any other domains besides bbot.org. Why? Firstly, sour grapes.

I started using "bbot" way back in 2003, but I didn't get around to registering the domain until 2005, which was real late in the game for four (ha) letter domain names. (My advice to 16-year-olds: register that domain name you're thinking of. Don't wait. Do it now. If you don't have your own bank account, then go to a grocery store and pick up a prepaid debit card. If you're 12, do the same thing, but try not to use a regrettable name. If you're six months old, then do the same thing. Most people get by just using Facebook as their canonical internet presence, because most people are stupid. Facebook is a for-profit company, and you really don't want a for-profit company owning your name.)

This meant that I didn't even have the option of registering the other permutations of bbot.org. They're all taken.

Secondly, trying to register every single variation on a name is an exercise in futility. There's 280 top level domains. Are you going to register all of them?

Then there's typosquatting,where attackers register misspelled versions of your domain. How many possible misspellings are there? Then there's registering variations of your domain, or X-sucks.com, etc etc etc.

This is all a waste of time. Nobody types in domain names anymore, they just use google, or a bookmark, or the browser history. It's just a cynical money grab, siphoning money from large corporations that are still under the delusion that they can manage their brand on the global internet.

But I might have to register bbot.xxx.