Irish Politicians Screw Up With XXX

History of Fine Gael (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An article in yesterday’s Sunday Times (Irish edition) by Harry Leech covers .xxx and Irish politicians and political parties.

It’s obvious that they didn’t do anything about protecting their “brand” in XXX:

Endakenny.xxx and finegael. xxx were both registered in December 2011, as were the addresses sinnfein.xxx and fiannafail.xxx

Needless to say the domains were not registered for either the politicians or the political parties in question:

A spokesperson for Fine Gael was quick to confirm that endakenny.xxx has nothing to do with the taoiseach, instead suggesting it had been bought by a so-called cybersquatter. “We won’t be involving ourselves with anyone looking to exploit the Fine Gael brand in this fashion,” she said.

A spokesperson for Sinn Fein said that it was “the first I’ve heard” of sinnfein.xxx, later confirming that the individual who had registered the site had nothing to do with the party. Fianna Fail’s press office said that it was unaware of the identity of the individual who had registered the fiannafail.xxx domain but that “it has nothing to do with us, absolutely not.”

Of course they could easily have blocked the registrations during the sunrise periods, but didn’t.

What will they do now?

Ignore the issue or go down the route of a UDRP?

Of course the same kind of thing happened to Irish politicians and political parties with the launch of .eu back in 2006.

 

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By Michele Neylon

Michele is founder and managing director of Irish domain registrar and hosting company Blacknight. Michele has been deeply involved in domain and internet policy discussions for more than a decade. He also co-hosts the Technology.ie podcast.

5 comments

  1. So what? It’s a huge waste of money to go around buying every version of a domain name possible, particularly with the advent of free-for-all TLDs.

    1. Hmm… internet registrar in “Register more domains” shock – who’d have thunk it.

  2. Hi Michele,
    Why should they care if somebody registers the domains? seriously? registering these would not be a good use of public (or party) funds.
    I notice that micheleneylon.xxx is not registered but blacknight.xxx is 😉
    Ross

    1. Ross

      The problem isn’t solely with .xxx.
      So far none of the .xxx domains in question have been used for anything that could be used against anyone (when I last checked none of them were resolving) however I’m sure you remember what happened with Bertie Ahern and a .com a few years ago?

      I’ll be posting at greater length about other issues with domains involving Irish political parties, but the basic issue, as I see it, is that they’re spending huge amounts of money on “digital” and they’re also preaching about it to the rest of us, yet when you look a bit closer you realise that they haven’t covered their own bases at all.

      Thanks for your comment

      Michele

      PS: Yes, I know I don’t have the .xxx – I would have liked to have got michele.xxx, but it’s been reserved by the registry

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