As the Sunrise Phase for .XXX went live yesterday, the ICM Registry, the body responsible for the New TLD, have blocked a large number of celebrity names in the .XXX namespace.

This means that the likes of Beyonce and Justin Bieber won’t need to worry about blocking their names in the upcoming Sunrise stage. It also removes the possibility that they will end up taking a cyber-squatter to court somewhere down the line to recover their domain, and their reputation!

Although the exact list has not been revealed, it’s thought that hundreds, even thousands of celebrity names have been withheld from release ahead of launch, and placed into a permanent “reserved” status by ICM. ICM have also kept quiet about the selection criteria for the names that have ended up in the list.

It is possible to do some digging however, and if you do a WHOis search on the ICM registry website, you can soon tell which celebrities have been added to the reservation list. Searching on a celebrity’s name will simply return “Not Found” if the domain is not in the list and “Reserved by ICM Registry” if it is.

It seems that the list is calculated on how famous you are, rather than raw sex appeal, as there is certainly a mixed bunch featuring in the list. The obvious choices all seem to be safe, including Madonna, Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. From the world of politics, the Obama’s have nothing to worry about, and both Hillary and Bill Clinton have their names blocked. George Bush is included in the list as well, just in case.

There are no corporate Trademarks included within the list, and those who wish to block their trademark from being registered in the .XXX domain type will still need to place a Sunrise SRB application as before. The list is simply designed to protect the rights of celebrities, as it is often much harder for them to obtain actual trademark status on their name.

In total, ICM have said that in the region of 15,000 domains have been blocked from registration so far. This includes domains in the above list, domains blocked on cultural grounds, and a large number of premium names for later auction.

They have also launched a new policy to combat Cyber Squatting called the Rapid Evaluation Service. This will simply turn off any domain that is guilty of an obvious infringement of the policy; with turnaround times being as short as 3 days after the complaint is made.

The Sunrise phase is now live and runs up until the 28th October 2011. If you’re not lucky enough to be a celebrity, you’d better get your application in quick to reserve your domain!

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