“If you want to complain about your Apple TV, Microsoft One Drive or Timex watch, you won’t be able to do it at appletv.sucks, onedrive.sucks or timex.sucks,” Aaron Pressman reports for Yahoo Finance. “Apple, Microsoft and Timex have already taken those monikers during the ongoing 60-day early registration period reserved for trademark holders and celebrities. Yahoo, the parent of Yahoo Finance, has also registered some .sucks names.”
“Oprah Winfrey, Kevin Spacey and Taylor Swift are trying to outsmart the haters,” Pressman reports. “Representatives for the celebrities, along with many well-known companies, are grabbing up new Internet website names ending in ‘.sucks’ at a cost of more than $2,000 a pop.”
Pressman reports, “The Vox Populi Registry, which won the right to oversee the .sucks domain, is disclosing the preregistrations as they come in, says CEO John Berard.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hoover and Dyson, too.
Why is The Vox Populi Registry or any company like it allowed to exist? Makes no sense.
It’s strictly business. ICANN opened up the list of potential Top Level Domains (TLDs) about two years ago, and made bidding open for any number of possible domain names, including .sucks, .xxx and others. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains)
Some will be useful. Others, not so much. A domain like .xxx was created so that adult sites could specifically use those to avoid legal issues.
In response, as soon as the .xxx domain became available, corporations around the world (from small start-ups to giants like Apple) snapped them up purely as a defensive move. Likewise, the same is true for .sucks.
I had to do this for a start-up I worked for. For a small company, it’s a costly but sadly defensive move. For a company like Apple, it’s a cost barely noticed. I guess you could call this blackmail, and it will make the domain registry a lot of money in the end. But to secure the domain, Vox Populi had to pay between $250K to $2 million.
Like I said, it’s strictly business. Sad, but true.
Another bonanza for domain registrants.
There’s a .sucker born every minute.
Why are they so worried? Ah, because they suck, not Kevin spacey, but for sure Oprah.
Why are you a troll is a better question.
lewinsky.sucks for the election.
Come on trolldude. Get back under your bridge and momma will throw down a nice goat for you if you stop bothering the nice people.
At Godaddy you can buy “oprahsucks.org” for $7.99. Yet this article suggests that famous people or companies are buying .sucks domains (eg-oprah.sucks) for $2000 or more. Basically “.sucks” is bait for dumb people who don’t realize that you can just insert “sucks” into any .com or .org address and get the same result.
Like trondudetrollsucks.sucks? Or just trolls suck.suck.
Silverhawk.blows is better
I’m sooooo upset by what you wrote, just horribly depressed by it, not! Go away ye of the small minded variety.
Just following your lead.
I say the make a .farts domain and publish who buys the names…:)
How did this idiocy ever happen in the first place? It makes a joke of internet naming conventions.