As new top-level domains continue to enter the marketplace, one of the most controversial has been dot-sucks. The new top-level domain has generated criticism for its business model as much as for the websites that are likely to use it, with the intellectual property community describing the model behind dot-sucks as “illicit” and “predatory, exploitive, and coercive”. That recently led to a complaint to ICANN, which took the unusual step of writing to the U.S. and Canadian governments to determine whether the company behind dot-sucks was violating any national laws, claiming it “was very concerned about any possible illegality.”
The decision to include the Canadian government in the letter stems from the fact that dot-sucks is owned by a subsidiary of Momentous Corp., an Ottawa-based company. This week, the Canadian government responded to the ICANN letter, making it clear that it has absolutely no intention of intervening in the case. The key paragraph in the letter signed by Industry Canada Deputy Minister John Knobley:
Canada’s laws provide comprehensive protections for all Canadians. Canada has intellectual property, competition, criminal law and other relevant legal frameworks in place to protect trademark owners, competitors, consumers and individuals. These frameworks are equally applicable to online activities and can provide recourse, for example, to trademark owners concerned about the use of the dotSucks domain, provided that trademark owners can demonstrate that the use of dotSucks domains infringes on a trademark. Intellectual property rights are privately held and are settled privately in the courts.
In other words, the Canadian government will not intervene on behalf of the intellectual property lobby’s efforts to curtail critical speech using dot-sucks domains. Unlike the U.S. response, which criticized ICANN’s policies on new gTLDs, the Canadian response hits the right tone, leaving potential private disputes to the courts, not government intervention.
Pretty obvious the .sucks domain is a ploy to eventually force companies and celebrities to purchase it for their names or buy their names on resale, to prevent somebody else from creating a site to slag them. I don’t think it’s well advised of ICANN to register that kind of domain, which doesn’t isolate and describe an activity but is simply an insult. One can think of other insulting appellations, no doubt in many languages, that can be marketed if ICANN opens the floodgates for them.
Wow! You mean a politician actually gave-up an opportunity to write a new law, which would have provided media opportunities, and referred to existing laws (so another political party could potentially claim they did all the work).
Amazing! Maybe those politicians should automatically receive a dotDoesNotSuck domain!
But seriously, if you block dotSucks they’ll either come up with some derivative or try it in another country until they succeed. There’s no point in our politicians wasting their time on this (and our money).
Most of these silly domains are going to be short-lived. Either because of libel and slander law suits; or because the novelty wears off.
Scott Adams (Dilbert) has been running an experiment lately on what elements are crucial to being popular on the internet. One of them is that you can’t use foul or offensive language: people just don’t want to be associated with that so they don’t re-share it – they might personally appreciate it but they won’t re-share it publicly.
So the potential of dotSucks and other domains like this limited, meaning their value is minimal.
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I’ve come across lots of www some-compay-sucks.com sites in the past. This situation is not particularly different. A company does not have to register all possible parody, complaining, trolling, or negative opinion domains in order to maintain their reputation. They’d best just maintain their reputation through their business actions. We’ve got plenty of relevant laws already, should there be civil issues.