Cyber gripers arise!

January 21, 2002 5:31 PM

Cyber gripers arise! In response to the trend of big corporations successfully taking 'sucks' domains away from the owners (vivendiuniversalsucks.com is an example in the article), the Free Speech Center will be offering 'sucks' domains for free for the taking (and presumably first amendment/article 19 exercising).
posted by o2b (10 comments total)

Part of that tortured reasoning included a passage explaining that VivendiUniversalSucks.com was a trademark infringement because a surfer might think it was company sponsored. It’s possible, WIPO said, that a company would post a site suggesting it “sucked” — such as a vacuum cleaner retailer.

Now THAT'S entertainment!
posted by Mach3avelli at 6:09 PM on January 21, 2002

Anyone know when this will happen? It ain't exactly news 'til it happens.
posted by bloggboy at 6:55 PM on January 21, 2002

I'm already thinking about the possibilities...

www.BritneySpearsSucks.com - how Britney got her record deal *gulp!*

Yeah, I'm sick...

BTW - what company would buy a 'sucks' domain. I doubt such blatant reverse psychology is an advertising tool worth spending money on... But that's just me.
posted by Dark Messiah at 6:59 PM on January 21, 2002

Mach3avelli: LOL!



bloggboy: Yeah, that whole millenium build-up was SO trite. jk.
posted by o2b at 7:17 PM on January 21, 2002

According to DomainSurfer, there are 27,585 domains with the word "sucks" in them. Half the fun is seeing which of those were actually registered by the companies themselves.
posted by nstop at 8:00 PM on January 21, 2002

See, you got me all excited. . .

But they are offering free SUBdomains. That's significantly less cool.
posted by UrbanFigaro at 8:47 PM on January 21, 2002

Want some conspiracy? I discovered in August that all of the following were mirror sites to the Bush/Cheney campaign page: www.bushsucks.com www.georgebushsucks.com, www.bushbites.com, www.georgebushbites.com, www.bushblows.com, www.georgebushblows.com...you get the picture. I'm not going to link to them all, if you get the urge, check 'em out for yourself. And, for the skeptics, i tried www.goresucks.com also, and it was not a page, which doesn't mean it was bought out by the campaign, but they didn't mirror it.
posted by Ufez Jones at 9:25 PM on January 21, 2002

grr. that should have read "...tried www.goresucks.com also, and it was not a page, which doesn't mean that it WASN'T bought out...." Sorry
posted by Ufez Jones at 9:27 PM on January 21, 2002

There were lots of stories on the net about the bush campaign buying the sucks domains in 2000.
posted by benh57 at 2:52 AM on January 22, 2002

Is this outfit even offering (or rather, planning to offer, since the linked page contains no information whatsoever and the article is rather vague) subdomain registry? The examples given make it sound like there will only be host aliases, not actual delegation of namespace.

Not to start a thread hijack or anything, but why in the world do so many people call a hostname (or a qualified name) a "domain?" They're two completely different things with very different uses.
posted by majick at 11:13 AM on January 22, 2002