This .sucks

A domain extension that may cause fear in the hearts of brand owners is .sucks – companies would hardly want to be on the other side of the dot with that one. The sunrise period for this extension will end on 29 May 2015. According to Vox Populi, the Registry company behind .sucks, this extension was “designed to…allow companies to find the value in criticism”. Value is key, given the rather hefty price tag that would accompany a .sucks registration post-sunrise. So what are ways to deal with this for brand owners? A cost-effective approach may instead be for rights holders to seek a blocking registration for a fee from 1 June 2015, betting that no one else will seek registration before them. A risk-averse rights holder may wish to hedge their bets and ensure that their trade marks are properly recorded in the Trademark Clearinghouse — a requirement for .sucks sunrise registrations. But does all of this really change anything? Domain name owners have been free to put a .com with the word 'sucks' in for years at a fraction of the cost, meaning that brand owners may prefer to spend their resources on other domain-related functions e.g registry-owned blocking services or actively registering new gTLD suffixes. Furthermore, even if brand.sucks is secured by the trade mark owner, a consumer still has thousands of other viable .sucks domain names at his or her disposal e.g brandreally.sucks. At the end of the day, unfortunately, nothing is going to prevent the registration of a domain name or use of a website designed purely as a non-commercial platform for consumer complaints and criticism.

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