7 ms·

A New Internet Domain: Extortion Or Free Speech?

34 points by dynofuz 12y ago

nashashmi 12y ago
edit: FYI, title got changed from "ycombinator.sucks - A New Internet Domain: Extortion Or Free Speech? (npr.org)" which is why I used the website name down here. ycomibinator.sucks? Maybe this is not such a bad idea. It can be a nice simple "living document" of criticisms to yCombinator. Often times, creators of products and services often look towards negative feedback to see how they can make their product/service better.
- ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
  Then perhaps it's more prudent to provide a service that collects negative feedback en masse as opposed to a targeted hit against one entity.
JonoW 12y ago
I don't really see how {company-name}.sucks is any worse than {company-name}sucks.com. Do firms really go around registering every combination of bad words with their brand name, with every standard TLD? Can't imagine they do...
- ownagefool 12y ago
  Yes. Not everyone does this of course, but anecdotally, some big companies have companies that scour the web looking for negative feedback. This dept often doesn't have the power to fix anything, so they'll buy up domains and give out freebies.
  - talmand 12y ago
    Reminds me of something I read about a while back. I believe the hacker magazine 2600 made a point about companies doing this by buying nbcsucks.com. At least I think it was nbc. Anyway, once the domain was seized for reasons, 2600 then registered nbcreallysucks.com. Then, after seizure, nbcreallyreallysucks.com and so on. At least, that's the way I recall it so I could be totally wrong.
  - fweespeech 12y ago
    And then we all make enough domains like ".sucks" and they stop the domain buying portion of the program :p
  - Alupis 12y ago
    So, every time ICANN wants more money they can just roll out a new TLD that has a negative connotation? There was a big uproar in the mainstream press when Taylor Swift bought up a bunch of explicit domains that could be used to deface her online presence... ICANN could just open up more explicit TLD's and she'll have to buy more and more. Or what about companies buying up entire TLD's without intent to be a registrar -- like Google's $25 Million purchase of .app. In short order all the "good" TLD's will be squatted on and we'll be in the same exact boat we are now with .com,.net, etc.
    - snowwrestler 12y ago
      Yes, these have been some of the arguments against the creation of all the new TLDs all along. It's important to note that ICANN does not set the pricing for each TLD. The pricing is set by the registrar who wins the right to control that TLD. ICANN does get revenue from each TLD registrar, but I think it's the same for each TLD. I don't think ICANN gets a direct cut of each GoDaddy sale, for example, but GoDaddy pays ICANN a fee to be able to sell domains.
- devur 12y ago
  Independent activists who want to use the suffix and pledge to blog can pay as little as $10 a year. But what if someone wants to claim another individual's name? Berard says the registry will police for cyberbullying. But if a person wants to preemptively block their name, that will cost $200 a year. It appears that it is cheaper to use the .sucks TLD for activism than for preventative purposes. Given the name of the TLD, however, "activism" could be conflated with denigration. Because of this, individuals likely to be targeted by such sites are claiming extortion. Does anyone know of any other cases in which the price of buying a domain is dependent on who the buyer is?
  - ianferrel 12y ago
    >Does anyone know of any other cases in which the price of buying a domain is dependent on who the buyer is? No, but that's because domain names have, until now, been closely held and (relatively) heavily regulated compared to other products. There are plenty of products where the cost varies based on the purchaser's ability to pay, or their expected use. In the realm of public discourse, newspapers and other publications have long had sections where anyone could write political or other opinions for free, even while they sold ad space to commercial interests for large amounts.
normloman 12y ago
Not extortion. Free speech. Freedom of speech means the freedom to criticize. As long as hate sites make clear that they are not affiliated with the thing they criticize, let them say what they want. If it's false information, sue them for libel. If it's true, get your shit together.
- dynofuz 12y ago
  the extortion part is heightened by the registrar for .sucks where it is asking organizations who own the trademark to pay 2500/yr to get a domain name
  - adwf 12y ago
    The possible upside is that if it's trademarked, no-one else should be to register the domain name either. However, that all depends on the rigourousness of the registrar...
    - aroch 12y ago
      Except that's not the case. The .sucks registrar is selling the trdemark-related domain for $10/y to someone who wants to criticize $Trademark, while it would cost $TrademarkCompany $2500/y. You can buy $yourname.sucks for $200/y, but someone who wants to criticize you can buy it for $10/y. Tiered pricing that charges more to people who aren't looking to disparage themselves is predatory.
      - nashashmi 12y ago
        > Tiered pricing that charges more to people who aren't looking to disparage themselves is predatory. Or its bribery to prevent free speech.
      - chii 12y ago
        it ought to be illegal to discriminate between buyers - it should either be open season auction, highest bidder wins, or a flat price for everything, but with trademark disputes process.
adwf 12y ago
I think it won't be long before someone gets sued over a .sucks or .porn style domain. Then we'll see what happens in court. Due to the nature of the internet it'll be a debate fought multiple times internationally as well, eg. the USA has completely different slander laws to the UK. The extortion angle is particularly interesting, because $2500 isn't exactly small money to prevent your personal name being registered on a .sucks domain. I think it would be wise for any of these new tld providers to offer free takedowns of malicious sites in order to avoid lawsuits. Extortion isn't a minor crime - it'll get you serious time in jail.
krapp 12y ago
Can we either get rid of TLDs or make them as arbitrary as the rest of the URL already? Is there a good reason why I shouldn't be able to go to some registry site and just buy ycombinator.clownpenis.fart if I want to, other than possibly being sued by ycombinator and/or NBC?
- ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
  I would argue that limiting the number of TLDs helped provide a measure of authority to those TLDs. I'm not saying that TLDs having a measure of authority was good, safe, or barely anything more than barely useful, but at least you could teach grandma to make sure she was on facebook.com instead of facebook.click
- transfire 12y ago
  I agree with you. This is purely a racket to make $$$. What we should be buying is "dot whatever". So Walmart would buy `.walmart` and Google would buy `.google`, etc. The names can be anything. And they shouldn't cost $100,000 either. Instead they should be like actual property and cost what the market will bare. There may be an associated ICANN annual fee, but that should be same for all domains. The whole concept of a limited selection of TLDs needs to go.
arkistouk 12y ago
The price is the sticking point for me... 2.5k is taking the piss!
lukifer 12y ago
For a select few, this will be an awesome branding opportunity (hoover.sucks, dyson.sucks). Ultimately, this is not a matter of free speech, which has always been a negative right: if you're not facing criminal charges or government harassment, your free speech rights are intact. Rather, this racket highlights why the web deserves a decentralized naming protocol, rather than an institution that combines the worst elements of arbitrary federal beauracracy and predatory, rent-seeking capitalism.
- chii 12y ago
  how do you do decentralized naming properly? bitcoin-like mechanism (where if you use more computing power, you get to own more names - on the average anyway)?
  - shawabawa3 12y ago
    There's already namecoin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin
    - chii 12y ago
      as i said: > where if you use more computing power, you get to own more names
  - lukifer 12y ago
    It is admittedly a tricky problem both in terms of engineering and social policy. NameCoin is one solution, although it has flaws that encourage squatting. I rather like the BitShares DNS [1] approach, where names are treated as scarce real estate, with an open bidding period before ownership is assigned. The major downside of a crypto solution is that names can be permanently and irrevocably lost or stolen if the key is mismanaged. But until OSs and browsers actually implement anything besides ICANN DNS, it's a moot point anyway. [1] http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/.p2p_%28BitShares_DNS%29 http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/.p2p_%28BitShares_DNS%29
mbarrett 12y ago
Side note. johnberardsucks.com is avail.
borgia 12y ago
>Independent activists who want to use the suffix and pledge to blog can pay as little as $10 a year. >But if a person wants to preemptively block their name, that will cost $200 a year. So you can buy a domain name on which to be critical about yourself for $10 per year, or fork out $200 to prevent others from doing so? Do I have to be critical of myself in that case? Or could I have borgia.sucks and have it listing my accomplishments and how great a person I am?
smutticus 12y ago
The reporting on the new .sucks domain has been terrible, so here's what's going on. The new gTLD Program from ICANN did more than just instantiate new domains. It created new processes and most importantly the Trademark Clearinghouse(TMCH). The TMCH is a database of validated trademarks from around the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_Clearinghouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_Clearinghouse Along with the TMCH ICANN also created the Domain Protected Marks List(DPML). When registries open up a new gTLD for registrations they must start with a sunrise period. During this sunrise period a registry can allow trademark holders whose trademark is registered in the TMCH early access to their trademark.gTLD. This special sunrise price is set by the registry and can basically be anything. Initially .sucks was talking about charging $25,000, but they lowered it to $2,500. After the sunrise period anyone can register a .sucks domain on a first-come, first-serve basis. The important thing to remember is that after the sunrise period the price discrimination goes away and both trademark holders and the general public pay the same amount for domain names. I'm a grad student at UC Berkeley who researches this stuff so AMA. I also wrote the Wikipedia page for the Trademark Clearinghouse so I can vouch for its correctness.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  Are you sure? My understanding is that the $2,500 price tag is not just during the sunrise period, that is the fee for TMCH-listed domains. I was told by my registrar to budget $2,500 annually for each TMCH-listed domain, into perpetuity. (We declined.) If a domain is not TMCH-listed, it will be $250 after the domain launches--unless you can prove you're an unaffiliated individual, and then you can access a special $10 registration. But for that price you can't run your own website--instead the domain must redirect to a web forum that the registrar will run (and no doubt put ads on). It looks a lot like a shakedown to me... edit: speling
  - smutticus 12y ago
    I don't think you're wrong describing it as a shakedown. It is a shakedown. It's the specifics of the shakedown that interest me. The DPML is a weird beast in that each registry chooses how they will run their program individually. For example, if you pay for DPML service for a TMCH listed mark from the Donuts registry your mark cannot be registered on any of Donut's gTLDs for the duration of your DPML block. You're also correct in that a DPML block is not the same as a domain registration. A DPML block simply prevents others from registering a domain which contains your TMCH registered mark. If your trademark is not in the TMCH then you gain no special rights to either defensively register, or DPML block others from registering it, during the sunrise period. I doubt Vox Populi can limit .sucks to a specific class of registrants. This does happen, but I haven't heard of it happening with .sucks. Most recently ICANN ruled that .doctors must limit registrants to registered physicians. This pissed off a lot of people. Without limiting registrants by class .sucks registry operator Vox Populi cannot charge one price to trademark holders, and another price to non-trademark holders. All they can do is offer sunrise period special rights to TMCH registrants. I can think of no other TLD in the history of the Internet that has enforced price discrimination. TLDs can have class restrictions placed on registrants(.doctor, .edu, .gov), but they cannot price discriminate AFAIK. Vox Populi was able to introduce price discrimination by essentially abusing the sunrise period and the DPML procedure. Have a listen to this. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-226-pilots-and-mental-illness-dot-sucks-and-pregnant-in-limbo-1.3009231/are-dot-sucks-domain-names-a-cash-grab-1.3009263 http://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-226-pilots-and-mental-i...
tracker1 12y ago
IMHO, if I were a large company, and someone tried to use my mark in such a way, I would simply sue them for trademark infringement. The registrar in this case... it's worked in suits against google in terms of advertising, and I'm pretty sure it would hold up here. In this case, I'm pretty sure a corporation protecting its' mark would win, and that it'd likely cost more than $2500. But for a corporation with a dedicated team of lawyers on-staff not a big deal.
- arfliw 12y ago
  It's not considered trademark infringement if you use it to criticize the company and you don't profit off of confusion with their mark. See paypalsucks.com which has won lawsuits against PayPal. If it's <company>.app or something then you're right. But 'sucks' is a unique case with precedent.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > It's not considered trademark infringement if you use it to criticize the company and you don't profit off of confusion with their mark. That's true of US law, in part because of the interaction of the US's unusually strong free-speech protections with trademark law. US law is not the only law which provides trademark rights which might be infringed by the use of gTLD.

34 points by dynofuz 12y ago

edit: FYI, title got changed from "ycombinator.sucks - A New Internet Domain: Extortion Or Free Speech? (npr.org)" which is why I used the website name down here. ycomibinator.sucks? Maybe this is not such a bad idea. It can be a nice simple "living document" of criticisms to yCombinator. Often times, creators of products and services often look towards negative feedback to see how they can make their product/service better.

ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
Then perhaps it's more prudent to provide a service that collects negative feedback en masse as opposed to a targeted hit against one entity.

JonoW 12y ago

I don't really see how {company-name}.sucks is any worse than {company-name}sucks.com. Do firms really go around registering every combination of bad words with their brand name, with every standard TLD? Can't imagine they do...

ownagefool 12y ago
Yes. Not everyone does this of course, but anecdotally, some big companies have companies that scour the web looking for negative feedback. This dept often doesn't have the power to fix anything, so they'll buy up domains and give out freebies.
- talmand 12y ago
  Reminds me of something I read about a while back. I believe the hacker magazine 2600 made a point about companies doing this by buying nbcsucks.com. At least I think it was nbc. Anyway, once the domain was seized for reasons, 2600 then registered nbcreallysucks.com. Then, after seizure, nbcreallyreallysucks.com and so on. At least, that's the way I recall it so I could be totally wrong.
- fweespeech 12y ago
  And then we all make enough domains like ".sucks" and they stop the domain buying portion of the program :p
- Alupis 12y ago
  So, every time ICANN wants more money they can just roll out a new TLD that has a negative connotation? There was a big uproar in the mainstream press when Taylor Swift bought up a bunch of explicit domains that could be used to deface her online presence... ICANN could just open up more explicit TLD's and she'll have to buy more and more. Or what about companies buying up entire TLD's without intent to be a registrar -- like Google's $25 Million purchase of .app. In short order all the "good" TLD's will be squatted on and we'll be in the same exact boat we are now with .com,.net, etc.
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    Yes, these have been some of the arguments against the creation of all the new TLDs all along. It's important to note that ICANN does not set the pricing for each TLD. The pricing is set by the registrar who wins the right to control that TLD. ICANN does get revenue from each TLD registrar, but I think it's the same for each TLD. I don't think ICANN gets a direct cut of each GoDaddy sale, for example, but GoDaddy pays ICANN a fee to be able to sell domains.
devur 12y ago
Independent activists who want to use the suffix and pledge to blog can pay as little as $10 a year. But what if someone wants to claim another individual's name? Berard says the registry will police for cyberbullying. But if a person wants to preemptively block their name, that will cost $200 a year. It appears that it is cheaper to use the .sucks TLD for activism than for preventative purposes. Given the name of the TLD, however, "activism" could be conflated with denigration. Because of this, individuals likely to be targeted by such sites are claiming extortion. Does anyone know of any other cases in which the price of buying a domain is dependent on who the buyer is?
- ianferrel 12y ago
  >Does anyone know of any other cases in which the price of buying a domain is dependent on who the buyer is? No, but that's because domain names have, until now, been closely held and (relatively) heavily regulated compared to other products. There are plenty of products where the cost varies based on the purchaser's ability to pay, or their expected use. In the realm of public discourse, newspapers and other publications have long had sections where anyone could write political or other opinions for free, even while they sold ad space to commercial interests for large amounts.

normloman 12y ago

Not extortion. Free speech. Freedom of speech means the freedom to criticize. As long as hate sites make clear that they are not affiliated with the thing they criticize, let them say what they want. If it's false information, sue them for libel. If it's true, get your shit together.

dynofuz 12y ago
the extortion part is heightened by the registrar for .sucks where it is asking organizations who own the trademark to pay 2500/yr to get a domain name
- adwf 12y ago
  The possible upside is that if it's trademarked, no-one else should be to register the domain name either. However, that all depends on the rigourousness of the registrar...
  - aroch 12y ago
    Except that's not the case. The .sucks registrar is selling the trdemark-related domain for $10/y to someone who wants to criticize $Trademark, while it would cost $TrademarkCompany $2500/y. You can buy $yourname.sucks for $200/y, but someone who wants to criticize you can buy it for $10/y. Tiered pricing that charges more to people who aren't looking to disparage themselves is predatory.
    - nashashmi 12y ago
      > Tiered pricing that charges more to people who aren't looking to disparage themselves is predatory. Or its bribery to prevent free speech.
    - chii 12y ago
      it ought to be illegal to discriminate between buyers - it should either be open season auction, highest bidder wins, or a flat price for everything, but with trademark disputes process.

adwf 12y ago

I think it won't be long before someone gets sued over a .sucks or .porn style domain. Then we'll see what happens in court. Due to the nature of the internet it'll be a debate fought multiple times internationally as well, eg. the USA has completely different slander laws to the UK. The extortion angle is particularly interesting, because $2500 isn't exactly small money to prevent your personal name being registered on a .sucks domain. I think it would be wise for any of these new tld providers to offer free takedowns of malicious sites in order to avoid lawsuits. Extortion isn't a minor crime - it'll get you serious time in jail.

krapp 12y ago

Can we either get rid of TLDs or make them as arbitrary as the rest of the URL already? Is there a good reason why I shouldn't be able to go to some registry site and just buy ycombinator.clownpenis.fart if I want to, other than possibly being sued by ycombinator and/or NBC?

ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
I would argue that limiting the number of TLDs helped provide a measure of authority to those TLDs. I'm not saying that TLDs having a measure of authority was good, safe, or barely anything more than barely useful, but at least you could teach grandma to make sure she was on facebook.com instead of facebook.click
transfire 12y ago
I agree with you. This is purely a racket to make $$$. What we should be buying is "dot whatever". So Walmart would buy `.walmart` and Google would buy `.google`, etc. The names can be anything. And they shouldn't cost $100,000 either. Instead they should be like actual property and cost what the market will bare. There may be an associated ICANN annual fee, but that should be same for all domains. The whole concept of a limited selection of TLDs needs to go.

arkistouk 12y ago

The price is the sticking point for me... 2.5k is taking the piss!

lukifer 12y ago

For a select few, this will be an awesome branding opportunity (hoover.sucks, dyson.sucks). Ultimately, this is not a matter of free speech, which has always been a negative right: if you're not facing criminal charges or government harassment, your free speech rights are intact. Rather, this racket highlights why the web deserves a decentralized naming protocol, rather than an institution that combines the worst elements of arbitrary federal beauracracy and predatory, rent-seeking capitalism.

chii 12y ago
how do you do decentralized naming properly? bitcoin-like mechanism (where if you use more computing power, you get to own more names - on the average anyway)?
- shawabawa3 12y ago
  There's already namecoin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin
  - chii 12y ago
    as i said: > where if you use more computing power, you get to own more names
- lukifer 12y ago
  It is admittedly a tricky problem both in terms of engineering and social policy. NameCoin is one solution, although it has flaws that encourage squatting. I rather like the BitShares DNS [1] approach, where names are treated as scarce real estate, with an open bidding period before ownership is assigned. The major downside of a crypto solution is that names can be permanently and irrevocably lost or stolen if the key is mismanaged. But until OSs and browsers actually implement anything besides ICANN DNS, it's a moot point anyway. [1] http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/.p2p_%28BitShares_DNS%29 http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/.p2p_%28BitShares_DNS%29

mbarrett 12y ago

Side note. johnberardsucks.com is avail.

borgia 12y ago

>Independent activists who want to use the suffix and pledge to blog can pay as little as $10 a year. >But if a person wants to preemptively block their name, that will cost $200 a year. So you can buy a domain name on which to be critical about yourself for $10 per year, or fork out $200 to prevent others from doing so? Do I have to be critical of myself in that case? Or could I have borgia.sucks and have it listing my accomplishments and how great a person I am?

smutticus 12y ago

The reporting on the new .sucks domain has been terrible, so here's what's going on. The new gTLD Program from ICANN did more than just instantiate new domains. It created new processes and most importantly the Trademark Clearinghouse(TMCH). The TMCH is a database of validated trademarks from around the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_Clearinghouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_Clearinghouse Along with the TMCH ICANN also created the Domain Protected Marks List(DPML). When registries open up a new gTLD for registrations they must start with a sunrise period. During this sunrise period a registry can allow trademark holders whose trademark is registered in the TMCH early access to their trademark.gTLD. This special sunrise price is set by the registry and can basically be anything. Initially .sucks was talking about charging $25,000, but they lowered it to $2,500. After the sunrise period anyone can register a .sucks domain on a first-come, first-serve basis. The important thing to remember is that after the sunrise period the price discrimination goes away and both trademark holders and the general public pay the same amount for domain names. I'm a grad student at UC Berkeley who researches this stuff so AMA. I also wrote the Wikipedia page for the Trademark Clearinghouse so I can vouch for its correctness.

snowwrestler 12y ago
Are you sure? My understanding is that the $2,500 price tag is not just during the sunrise period, that is the fee for TMCH-listed domains. I was told by my registrar to budget $2,500 annually for each TMCH-listed domain, into perpetuity. (We declined.) If a domain is not TMCH-listed, it will be $250 after the domain launches--unless you can prove you're an unaffiliated individual, and then you can access a special $10 registration. But for that price you can't run your own website--instead the domain must redirect to a web forum that the registrar will run (and no doubt put ads on). It looks a lot like a shakedown to me... edit: speling
- smutticus 12y ago
  I don't think you're wrong describing it as a shakedown. It is a shakedown. It's the specifics of the shakedown that interest me. The DPML is a weird beast in that each registry chooses how they will run their program individually. For example, if you pay for DPML service for a TMCH listed mark from the Donuts registry your mark cannot be registered on any of Donut's gTLDs for the duration of your DPML block. You're also correct in that a DPML block is not the same as a domain registration. A DPML block simply prevents others from registering a domain which contains your TMCH registered mark. If your trademark is not in the TMCH then you gain no special rights to either defensively register, or DPML block others from registering it, during the sunrise period. I doubt Vox Populi can limit .sucks to a specific class of registrants. This does happen, but I haven't heard of it happening with .sucks. Most recently ICANN ruled that .doctors must limit registrants to registered physicians. This pissed off a lot of people. Without limiting registrants by class .sucks registry operator Vox Populi cannot charge one price to trademark holders, and another price to non-trademark holders. All they can do is offer sunrise period special rights to TMCH registrants. I can think of no other TLD in the history of the Internet that has enforced price discrimination. TLDs can have class restrictions placed on registrants(.doctor, .edu, .gov), but they cannot price discriminate AFAIK. Vox Populi was able to introduce price discrimination by essentially abusing the sunrise period and the DPML procedure. Have a listen to this. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-226-pilots-and-mental-illness-dot-sucks-and-pregnant-in-limbo-1.3009231/are-dot-sucks-domain-names-a-cash-grab-1.3009263 http://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-226-pilots-and-mental-i...

tracker1 12y ago

IMHO, if I were a large company, and someone tried to use my mark in such a way, I would simply sue them for trademark infringement. The registrar in this case... it's worked in suits against google in terms of advertising, and I'm pretty sure it would hold up here. In this case, I'm pretty sure a corporation protecting its' mark would win, and that it'd likely cost more than $2500. But for a corporation with a dedicated team of lawyers on-staff not a big deal.

arfliw 12y ago
It's not considered trademark infringement if you use it to criticize the company and you don't profit off of confusion with their mark. See paypalsucks.com which has won lawsuits against PayPal. If it's <company>.app or something then you're right. But 'sucks' is a unique case with precedent.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > It's not considered trademark infringement if you use it to criticize the company and you don't profit off of confusion with their mark. That's true of US law, in part because of the interaction of the US's unusually strong free-speech protections with trademark law. US law is not the only law which provides trademark rights which might be infringed by the use of gTLD.