Oprah, Apple and Microsoft among companies paying to protect their brands.
Intellectual property interests and brands owners are upset about the .sucks domain name and its pricing, but many big brands aren’t taking chances even as ICANN asks government regulators to review it.
.Sucks registry Vox Populi continues to advertise which companies are coughing up dough to prevent their .sucks domains from being available to the general public. Some of the latest: Oprah (Oprah.sucks), Verizon (Verizon.sucks), Apple (iPad.sucks) and Microsoft (xbox.sucks).
Sunrise pricing has an MSRP of $2,499, although some domains are marked as premium and come with higher prices. Prices will be lower after sunrise, but not necessarily for premium names. Consumers that want to register a .sucks domain and agree to use a dedicated platform can get the domains for only $9.99 during general availability.
Brand protection registrar MarkMonitor is charging just $25 above wholesale for .sucks domains.
Yesterday ICANN asked the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Canada’s Office of Consumer Affairs to look into .sucks’ pricing after the Intellectual Property Constituency described it as “predatory, exploitative and coercive”.
Mark Harshman says
Not my cup of tea to register a domain with the primary purpose of disparaging someones name. After reading the various articles concerning the situation with .sucks, The CEO John Berard apparently believes there is no problem with this. Gee, that’s funny. I can’t help but wonder if he would have any problem with someone registering JohnBerardsucks.com, which appears to be still open, for about ten bucks. I guess that would be no problem at all with him.
Chris Pecic says
Here are some domain names that I am going to register.
NETWORK-SOLUTIONS.SUCKS
WEB.COM.SUCKS
DAVID-BROWN.SUCKS
GREG-KLUG.SUCKS
Cam says
If the objective here is to give the little people a chance to vent, than .sucks should not allow the big brands to register there own names. What will happen is that most of the big brands will cave in and pay the outrageous fees and .sucks will never exist in the real world except for bully sites like johndoe.sucks. This is extortion. This has nothing to do with helping the consumer. This is bad carma. This should be illegal. .sucks sucks !
Sam says
I like Vox Populi’s goals, but I think the FTC will object to them showing different prices to different people for the same product…