As recently as last month, people looking for information about the county of Peeblesshire would have dialed up Peeblesshire.com only to find an adult website.
Entrepreneur Tom Butler has been working to buy back the domain name and replace the adult site with a standard tourism portal for the region.
Butler blamed the adult website on an early Internet trend: buying domains with geographical importance with the intention of selling them for profit.
“In 1995, when the Internet exploded, a lot of people began registering geographical domain names knowing that in years to come they would be worth money," he said. “Most of them use the names for gambling or porn."
Butler's work focuses on buying domains like Peeblesshire.com and reconfiguring them for mainstream use.
"I’ve bought and turned back into tourist sites [places] with names such as Largs, Helensburgh, East Kilbride and Dunoon," he said. "The people who own these sites acquired them for free by just registering them and they sell them for five-figure sums.
Butler said he was in negotiations with a South African webmaster for the Peebesshire.com domain.
“The site should be advertising tourist attractions, restaurants and hotels, not porn and gambling sites," he said. "I’m just glad to bring Scottish names back into Scottish hands and put them to proper use.”
As of today, Peeblesshire.com leads to a typical domain holding page with a search field and a few simple links. There are no adult images on the page, but one of the links is for adult DVDs. The search engine only returns results for commercial products.
