ICANN.sucks

There’s been quite a bit of debate in the press about the new .sucks top level Internet domain, including this article in the New Zealand Herald. It does have its proponents, of course. The nic.sucks website claims that it can be used to ‘foster debate’ and ‘share opinions’. They suggest that it is valuable for cause marketing, consumer advocacy, anti-bullying etc. I can’t help wondering why other less infantile domains can’t be used for these worthy causes. In fact, of course, it’s just a free-for-all that makes individuals and organisations have to run around paying stupid prices for these domains just to protect themselves from Internet trolls. Obviously no-one could have seen that coming, right?

The body responsible for allowing new domain names is ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which claims to be a ‘not-for-profit public-benefit corporation’. I do wonder about the public benefit aspects. The socially aware and compassionate people who suggested the SUCKS domain name were Top Level Spectrum, Inc., Vox Populi Registry Inc. and Dog Bloom, LLC. All concerned charities with our welfare at heart, I’m sure. Vox Populi also won the auction to have the right to extort money from everyone wanting to defend themselves from this domain name. The three SUCKS entries were some of the 1,930 suggestions received by ICANN for new top level domain names in 2012. You can see the full list at http://money.cnn.com/infographic/technology/new-gtld-list/. Most of them were reasonably sensible, if largely self-serving, with lots of corporations wanting their own domains. There were, however, several stupid and destructive suggestions that were clearly rejected out of hand. These included SEX, SEXY, WTF and SUCKS… oh, wait…

I suppose if you make more than half a million dollars from the faceless corporations who suggest a domain like SUCKS (that’s just for making the suggestions – each one cost $185,000) you owe them back, however much collateral damage you cause in the process. Not to mention the millions of dollars you can make from selling the rights to the domain itself, as this list of domain auctions shows. ICANN are now running around trying to close the stable door after the horse has bolted. Too little, too late.

It will be interesting to see who ends up as the owner of http://www.icann.sucks