Harvard.xxx: Bad for the Brand

Imagine trying to access Harvard University's homepage after a long night of debauchery, only to find yourself staring instead at the homepage of an Ivy League-themed porn site, accessed via harvard.xxx. Keep dreaming—that internet fantasy won't be happening anytime soon.Although some might delight in such a turn of events, Harvard seems to have felt that the prospect of a porn site named after our dear school would not be the best for the University's brand. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, in 2011—when .xxx was first added as an available suffix for domain names—Harvard forked over up to $300 to register harvard.xxx and prevent the address from being claimed by another party and made into a porn site. (Businessweek also suggests that other universities may have made similar financial investments to ensure their names weren't used on .xxx domains.)

Now, as part of the internet's first major expansion in almost a decade, more suffixes—including .fail and .sex—will be added to the list of available names with "the right of the dot."

So will Harvard get in on the new "dot" action? And what would a Harvard.fail even look like? The possibilities are endless.