.XXX marks the (danger) spot

The story goes: "A little boy goes to school and gets his test paper back marked 'XXX'. He asks his mother what it means and gets a shelling. He now knows what XXX means. On Valentine's Day, a little girl gave him a card signed off as 'XXX'. He is shocked why someone would send him such a nasty thing."

Like that little boy, we now have to contend with XXX--and the definition of this XXX is equally confusing. The reason is that with ICANN's approval of the .XXX top-level domain (TLD) and the appointment of ICM Registry, the online world is now complicated, with its own red light district.

Generally, the .XXX TLD is available for registration only by signedup members of the adult industry. So how does that affect the rest of us? Well, because of what .XXX will be associated with, some of us may not ever want our domains with this TLD. This is the unique part of the .XXX TLD--it is the TLD that people may actually not want to get.

Therefore, a procedure called the Sunrise B has been set up to allow brand owners to block off registrations of their domain names in the .XXX TLD.

The reason why I'm writing about this is that there are pre-conditions to observe and you need to get this in place when Sunrise B comes up in September 2011.