I think we almost have to. If you don't grab your trademark now then someone else might, and you don't want someone squatting on it with dodgy content :/
They are super expensive though, 10x the price of a .com.
They are super expensive though, 10x the price of a .com.
It'd be stupid to waste money on every TLD; there are going to be hundreds of them eventually. There's no reason to voluntarily give your money away for no benefit to you. If someone tries to extort you by abusing your trademark, cross that bridge when you come to it by suing the offender.
My concern is that many people on HN are building brands, and the last thing you want is someone buying yourbrand.xxx and covering it with porn.
If you have an established brand, you almost have to buy the .xxx.
Why would you want to "win it back" in the case of yourbrand.xxx? It's worthless to a non-porn brand.
"My concern is that many people on HN are building brands, and the last thing you want is someone buying yourbrand.xxx and covering it with porn."
Why would this be a concern? It's not worth anything to a pornographer to, for example, register virtualmin.xxx and cover it with porn (except maybe for extortion value). I could see "google.xxx" or "twitter.xxx" being a problem, but in those cases, they'd want to sue for trademark infringement. The domain name is irrelevant.
"If you have an established brand, you almost have to buy the .xxx."
If so, it's a license to extort money. I'm just not going to participate in that sort of scam, and I don't think anyone else should, either. All the people that do are funding further efforts in the same direction.
It is a risk decision for these businesses.
For a relatively small amount of money companies are removing the potential brand and legal cost risk of not owning their .xxx. The more important your brand the more likely you will be to pay.
I totally agree with you that this is 'extortion', but just because it may not be right, doesn't mean we won't be affected by it.
Not unless a reseller has the .com. This assume you aren't going for something clever though.