I wrote an article on my work blog yesterday about the new rules for top level domains (TLDs) that were approved by ICANN this week. In it, I gave a list of a few examples of the new TLDs that we are likely to see - one of them was .sucks
It's almost an internet convention that if you want to build a complaint website about a company, it has the name "xxxxx sucks". For example www.microsoftsucks.org, www.googlesearchsucks.com, www.mac-sucks.com, etc -- you get the idea.
Since I can be a bit of a corporate complainer, I thought, why not create a new top level domain registry selling .sucks domain names - it could be the preferred TLD for complaint and protest sites on the web.
Of course, the companies whom these complaint sites are about don't always like this negative comment about them on the web, and it's not unknown for them to buy up variations of their own names with "sucks" on the end, to prevent dissatisfied customers getting there first. So, my .sucks registry would turn normal conventions on their head and have the rule that companies cannot register their own names or trademarks.
So Microsoft couldn't register www.vista.sucks; Google couldn't register www.google.sucks and McDonalds couldn't register www.bigmacs.sucks* etc. Only dissatisfied customers could. It could be used for more general protests - www.drm.sucks or www.homework.sucks. If we don't do a good job as a registry, someone would be perfectly entitled to register dotsucks.sucks - it's only fair!
To ensure equal access to any member of the public, domain registrations would cost the same as a .com, and to ensure a robust level of protest, renewals would only be allowed if the domain is being actively used. A complaint domain is no use if it's taken over by a spam portal, as many unused .com domains are now.
It's already been upheld by ICANN that using whatever-sucks.com to air consumer grievances is legitimate and allowed, and there's not really much the companies can do.
So - that's my simple plan. Now all I need is someone with the $100,000 ICANN registration fee, and a load of server infrastructure to run the registry on...
* Maybe we'd also need .suck, for plurals to make sense...
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