The group that oversees the Internet's naming and address system on Thursday asked the Federal Trade Commission to review whether any laws have been broken in the roll out of a new .sucks domain.Lessee.... You can buy your .sucks domain for $2,000 now or you can wait a month or two and let some crazy guy with a grudge against you have it. Nah! That's not extortion or anything.
Currently, only trademark holders and celebrities may register Internet addresses ending in .sucks at a cost of more than $2,000 per name. Once the early registration period ends, ordinary people will be able to register .sucks names for as little as $10 in June.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit that sets policies for the global domain name system, said in a letter to the FTC and Canada's Office of Consumer Affairs that companies have complained the system is "predatory, exploitive and coercive."
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/s/internet-n ... 34421.html
Whether it's been innocently or not, ICANN's been running that scam since they figured out that copyright holders were having to buy both their .com and .net domains. Then they brought out .biz, .info, .us, .whatever... until people just started giving up. Even at $10 a pop for the cheaper TLDs, that can run into some money. And in most cases the domains aren't even used, other than as a redirect to the owner's .com address.
I considered buying my .net and/or .org years ago when domains were around $100 a year but I decided I had better uses for the money. Never considered any of the later ones, but I imagine a lot of actual businesses have had to shell out considerable cash just to protect their copyrights. I'm surprised nobody's seriously called ICANN on it.
