the words "Well, this .sucks" with the "sucks" indicating it is a URL extension

Last month, we posted a blog about the huge expansion in extensions. Those are the letters that come after the "dot" in your URL, you know, the .com, .net, .org.

.sucks, the newest URL extension, truly sucks for many politicians.

As a Columbus Ohio web design firm, we try to keep up on these types of things that relate to the web design world.

So if you didn't know about the extensions .xxx, .bible, .nyc, .boston, .builders, and .surgeons,  most likely you didn't know about the .sucks.

As of March 2015, a new top-level domain went on sale that is bound to get a lot of websites using it. Especially now that the 2016 presidential election is revving up. If each candidate hasn't already bought their name with the .sucks after it, you can bet someone else will. And nothing good will come of that for the "presidential hopefuls."

Surprisingly, as of this blog post, most of the candidates names with .sucks after it either hasn't been bought, or hasn't had websites built yet using those URLs.

That said, many high profile companies might also be considering buying their names with the .sucks extension, because hey, you just never know...

Being master of your own domain.

Non-tech-savvy 2016 presidential candidates had lots of fails themselves when it came to buying the domain names with THEIR names. Granted, there are dozens of options one can register with their name in it (ie: TedCruzForAmerica.com, all the .net, .org, .us versions, etc.)

Here are some of the fails by some of the 2016 crop of presidential candidates:

  • U.S. Senator Ted Cruz discovered his staff didn't to buy the domain name TedCruz.com for his presidential bid. But someone else did, and now that URL takes voters to a pro-Obama site. And the domain name TedCruzForAmerica.com takes people to a website praising Obama’s Affordable Care Act. His actual website is TedCruz.org.
  • U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan isn't the proud owner of PaulRyan.com, which is redirected to Everest Music, a UK-based music store. (His dad should have bought the PaulRyan.com domain when Paul was a child.)
  • Florida Gov. Jeb Bush doesn’t own JebBushForPresident.com. Two gay men from Oregon do, and they post about same-sex marriage and other LGBT issues. And JebBushForPresident.net is an anti-Bush site dedicated to “saving the Republican party from supporting Jeb Bush for president.”
  • Donald Trump doesn't own DonaldTrumpforAmerica.com, which redirects users to healthcare.gov where they can sign up for Obama-care. However, he does own Trump.com for his businesses, and DonadTrump.com for his presidential campaign. So ten bonus points for him.
  • Governor Rick Perry did register RickPerry.org, but not RickPerry.com. We searched RickPerry.com which, oddly, redirected us to the Google images page of Rick Perry photos.  
  • Carly Fiorina didn't register CarlyFiorina.org. That URL was bought by a critic of hers who put up a website that said: “Carly Fiorina failed to register this domain. So I’m using it to tell you how many people she laid off at Hewlett-Packard. It was this many,” the site states, followed by 30,000 sad-face emoticons. As you would imagine, she disputes this statistic.
  • Hillary Clinton has been around long enough, and has seen these issues when Bill was president, so she got her domain name early on, well before she was running for president.

  • ChrisChristie.com has been registered to a computer programmer in Wisconsin named Chris Christie.

Which brings us to a suggestion: buy your kid's names as a .com (and a .name) domain now so they have it for when they start they become rich and/or famous.

What does it say about a candidate without the right URL?

That they're not very forward thinking.

Kristine Dorrain is an attorney, and director of Internet and IP Services for Minneapolis-based FORUM (formerly, the National Arbitration Forum). Evidently, she has resolved domain name disputes for people like Mick Jagger and Eva Longoria, as well as political candidates. Kristine's insightful comment about this lack of foresight was summed by saying "A presidential candidate who doesn’t own his or her own domain name suggests that they’re not looking to the future, a time when everyone is mobile, everything is online and every voter is connected digitally.”

When can you legitimately have a domain name if it's not your name?

Obviously, Governor Chris Christie has no case against Chris Christie, the computer programmer. Of course, capitalism can prevail, and Governor Chris Christie could offer $20,000 for that domain, to Chris Christie the computer programmer.

However, what does it depend on if someone can legitimately use a domain name? Simply, it depends is what each domain name owner is using it for.

The singer Madonna owns Madonna.com. However, if the domain name was registered first by the Catholic Church for a site about the Virgin Mary, in an effort to share images of the (original) Madonna painted by Da Vinci and Michelangelo, the church would be able to keep that ownership.

Certain .sucks URLs can go for up to $2,500. Per year!

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which approves ALL new URL extensions, approved the .SUCKS domain in May of this year.

The company that started .sucks is Vox Populi (Voice of the People), a subsidiary of Canadian-based Momentous Corp., which acquired the .sucks domain name for $3 million last year. So a single company can lobby ICANN to institute a new extension, and control it. Something new to us.

Vox Populi says it is intended to be used for “cause marketing (e.g. cancer.sucks), consumer advocacy and customer service.”

However, the blogosphere is saying that's disingenuous, and both brands and individuals (ie: presidential candidates) are essentially being held to pay "ransom" for that domain name. Vox Populi has set aside the names of large companies ending in .sucks that will cost that much as $2,500 a year to register. To many of those companies, that sounded like extortion, plain and simple.

It already has been abused...

... because someone has already posted an image of a billboard in Boston that says New York.sucks.

That complicated pricing structure, where certain URLs can go up to $2,500, though personal usage will cost $249, does seem like extortion. And a lot of money when most URLs are $10 to $20 a year. Supposedly, Vox Populi says they'll have a ban on using the .sucks as a URL to criticize company. Those that try to do that will have a mandatory link to a discussion forum, which coincidentally, will be hosted on www.Everything.sucks, Vox Populi’s website.

From our perspective, this seems to be the beginning of the privatization of pieces of the internet, and we'll be writing a blog on that soon.
 
btw, you can register a .sucks name here.