U.S. and Canadian trade authorities have been asked to investigate Canadian company Vox Populi by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in relation to a request to stop the rollout of the ".sucks" domain.
ICANN's Intellectual Property Constituency (IPC), which put forth the request, said Vox Populi's practices "can best be described as predatory, exploitative and coercive."
In a blog post on ICANN's official site, Allen Grogan, ICANN's chief contract compliance officer, said the group takes [pdf] the allegations seriously and has asked the help of trade authorities.
"We have sent letters to both the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and, because Vox Populi is a Canadian enterprise, Canada's Office of Consumer Affairs (OCA), asking them to consider assessing and determining whether or not Vox Populi is violating any of the laws or regulations those agencies enforce," Grogan wrote.
Vox Populi announced that trademark owners would be charged $2,499 per year to buy domains ending in ".sucks."
Controversy surrounding domain names made a number of headlines in the past few months, with Taylor Swift having bought "taylorswift.xxx" in order to prevent others from being able to use the such domain names.
The problem with this is that companies presumably want to prevent others from being able to buy domains like "mcdonalds.sucks" to prevent unflattering websites being used to deface these companies.
In fact, reports suggest that the likes of Kevin Spacey, Microsoft, Google and Apple have all bought their respective ".sucks" domains in order to prevent others from buying them.
"VoxPop has colored well within the lines both of ICANN's rules and national laws so I was surprised by the request," said Vox Populi CEO John Berard in response to Icann's move. "I would first have expected a question from ICANN or an aggrieved party, but got none. Perhaps it is driven by genuine concerns or it may be a case of the squeaky wheel. Either way, we see real value in bringing these names to life online. There is much to be learned from criticism."
The practice of buying domain names in order to prevent others from using them is called "defensive registering," and has been known to happen in the past. The issue here, however, is that Vox Populi seems to be charging as much as it can possibly get away with, justifying the high price tags as something that should be "a reasonable part of a companies PR budget."
Of course, companies can choose not to purchase their respective ".sucks" domains, and after a period of time, these domain names will be on sale to anyone who wants them for up to $250. Some domains will even be available for as low as $10 per month.
It is not currently clear if Vox Populi actually acted outside what it was able to do, but it seems as though it is well above board to charge these prices for domains. As the company with the license to sell .sucks domains, it certainly could have charged far more. In fact, it originally planned to sell the domains for up to a whopping $25,000 but decided against it in the end.
