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Watch this jaw-dropping .sucks promo vid

Kevin Murphy, March 13, 2015, 12:05:11 (UTC), Domain Registries

Is .sucks just a domain name registry? A way to extort money from trademark owners?
No, it’s the about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, the kind of thing civil rights movement leaders including Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson could get behind.
At least, that’s the message in the jaw-dropping debut promo video for the new gTLD .sucks, which hits sunrise at the end of the month.
You may not instinctively associate registering a domain name with, say, Rosa Parks refusing to comply with Alabama’s racist segregation laws in the 1950s, but that’s what Vox Populi Registry is inviting you to do.

The video opens with stock news footage of MLK and various civil rights marches, accompanied by what seems to be audio from one of King’s speeches.
The video goes on to intermingle archive footage with nauseating B-roll padding, until we discover that none other than former US presidential candidate Ralph Nader loves .sucks.
He’s provided what seems to be an official endorsement, saying in part:

Most of the great changes in our planet’s history come from less than 1% of the people. For many changes in our country and the world, it’s a lot easier than we think. The word “sucks” is now a protest word, and it’s up to people to give it more meaning.

Nader is not as random a celebrity endorser as you might imagine. Fifteen years ago he wrote to ICANN to specifically endorse the creation of .sucks.
What do you think of the video? Clever? Inspiring? Funny? Tasteless? Offensive? Or just baffling?

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Comments (12)

  1. BT says:

    If they get the “pay $9 and get a free instant website to protest your grievance” piece right, .sucks could be powerful and google spiders will love it
    from their site: Domains will point to the everything.sucks forum-platform which will provide a free hosted consumer forum for the individual domain. ie: http://www.ProductA.sucks will resolve to a website with a discussion-forum on ProductA.

  2. Gaz says:

    They’re talking about freedom… the freedom to abuse others!
    No matter how they word it, it is a scumbag top level domain. I know they’ve talked about high pricing before and I hope they go for that. It will be an embarrassment to the whole program if a TLD becomes well known for the likes of cyber bullying.
    ICANN should have used some common sense and blocked this one, but it’s not a great surprise that they did not block it.

    • Kevin Murphy says:

      Vox Pop does have a policy against cyber-bullying. You can lose your domain if you do it.
      I’m not sure there are many kids out there who would be willing or able to pay $250 just to pick on another kid anyway.

    • I think it fucking.sucks. In fact, fucking.sucks may be the best name out of the whole gtld. But most likely it will be blocked.

  3. Equalizatore says:

    Extorsion + Bad Taste = Desperation
    Can you smell it?

  4. Tony says:

    The real test of their metal will be found in whether they reserve VoxPopuliRegistry.sucks and variations thereof. If they don’t think it will be used for extortion, then they shouldn’t be afraid to walk in every other organization’s shoes.
    At least we can all agree that racism sucks!

  5. Colin says:

    Kevin,
    Can you confirm this is real or joke? Where did you get this video. Was it promoted by .SUCKS. Are you suggesting Ralph Nader supports the current strategy laid out by Vox?
    Colin

  6. David Gruttadaurio says:

    If it would be used to fight injustice… great. But it’s only the “1% of people” mentioned by Nader that will use .sucks that way. The rest will attack and bitch and target anyone or anything just to get noticed. It will become cyber extortion.

  7. DNsale says:

    Exactly David, I agree with you.
    These silly extensions can never take over the genericTLDs

  8. Google Sucks says:

    What’s the point of this domain if they allow a trademark sunrise period for the most important giant corporations to register their domains and take it off the market. Google already registered most of their Google.EXT domains, and you only have to be creative to find a decent name to use. We had great hopes for this extension but it seems the registrar wants to exploit the message and just make a ton of money while leaving nothing decent to register to really protest well-known companies. If i have to register Google-sucks.sucks then they can suck it! Screw that!

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