Last week, I blogged about the practice of buying up negative names as a defensive PR measure.
As a follow-up, I’m posting part of an email I got from a blog reader (who asked to remain anon).
In the year 2000 (no this isn’t a Conan O’Brien skit) 2600 Magazine ran an article in their print version about how Verizon (which was a brand new company at the time) was registering about 700 domain names along the same lines. The article included every single domain name the 2600 writers could find. I’ve been searching 2600 online and can’t find that exact article (I’m not sure if they put the print articles on-line or not) but I can find several references to it, and to the ‘cyber-squatting’ suit Verizon filed against 2600 and Emmanuel Goldstein for registering ‘verizonreallysucks.com’. Link.
While searching through 2600 for the right article I came across a PDF of a deposition Eric Corley (aka Emmanuel Goldstein) gave when sued by Ford for registering ‘fuckgeneralmotors.com’ and pointing it to Ford’s website. Link here and here.
In item 24 Eric/Emmanuel describes Carl Rove registering 30 some odd domain names like “bushsucks.com’ and Verizon registering 700+ domain names.
In that point he also references a ‘”Lucentsucks” case’. A quick search of ‘lucentsucks’ reveals that some jokester registered that domain and put up a porn site. Lucent sued but the case was dismissed due to Lucent’s failure to comply with the Anti-cybersquatting provisions. Which is a bit off topic… but perhaps is part of the rationale behind mass domain registration.
So as my loyal reader points out, there’s other people doing this and it’s been going on for some time [apparently at least since 1998 (Earthweb) but possibly earlier].
Any other examples out there you know of? Feel free to comment.
Alex Eckelberry