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*                                                            * 
*                         CYBERSPACE                         * 
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         * 
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   * 
*                                                            * 
* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer                                  * 
* Free for online distribution                               * 
* All Rights Reserved                                        * 
* Direct comments and questions to:                          * 
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yourcompanysucks.com

There's a famous story about Time magazine's Internet 
reporter Joshua Quittner who, in 1994, tried to persuade 
McDonalds to register mcdonalds.com. No matter who he spoke 
to in the McDonald's corporate hierarchy, he could not 
convince them the day would come when the hamburger peddler 
might want a net presence.

Quittner then went ahead and registered mcdonalds.com. 
Eventually the makers of those tasty Big Macs got a clue and 
corporate lawyers started threatening to sue. An urban legend 
emerged that Quittner convinced McDonalds to pay him millions 
of dollars for the rights to the domain name. 

Quittner could probably have settled out of court for a tasty 
sum. An engineer quite innocently registered altavista.com in 
1994. A couple years ago he pocketed over $3 million when 
Compaq decided net surfers were tired of typing 
"www.altavista.digital.com" to access the AltvaVista search 
engine. Instead of chasing the big bucks, Quittner let 
McDonalds have the domain in exchange for a $3,500 donation 
to a public school in Brooklyn.

What a sweety!

These days, no one would be foolish enough to start a company 
and not have a dot-com presence. It's increasingly 
fashionable to have dot-com in your company's official name. 
It's not Amazon Books; it's simply Amazon.com. There's 
another urban legend floating around about a non-computer 
related company added a dot-com to its name simply to spike 
the stock price and make the principle shareholders rich.

I'd almost believe the legend too, given software companies 
with negligible sales and the most tenuous of connections to 
Linux suddenly find themselves with market caps greater than 
General Electric.

Even if you secure your company's name as a domain, the 
registering game is not over. Typing www.wallstreet.com into 
your browser brings up a page about the stock market. If you 
accidentally drop one of the L's, you get a rather racy page 
devoted to a rising and falling action of another sort.

Companies have learned to secure the rights to obvious typos 
and avoid the embarrassment of having sloppy touch typists 
reaching porn sites.

But wait, there's more. Companies are also finding it prudent 
to register the company name with "sucks" at the end. People 
with beefs against major corporations have been registering 
domains like fordsucks.com and barbiesucks.com. They then put 
up pages that offer everything from insightful criticism to 
spleen-venting vitriol.

As fast as people can register these domains and post their 
complaints, corporate lawyers issue the customary threats and 
the pages come down.

One of the oldest sucks pages that has so far managed to 
successfully test the truly American notion that criticism 
and parody are forms of protected speech is www.aolsucks.com. 
Registered in 1996, the page has given people frustrated with 
the mega-online service a place to vent. AOL, previously a 
closed system, sort of stumbled onto the net in the mid-'90s 
with an interface that couldn't handle email, news, and web 
browsing in a fashion that didn't make everything look ugly 
to people using real ISPs. AOL took a lot of heat but it 
learned quickly. It helped lead a massive charge against spam 
and became a good, responsible provider.

You'll find a bit of an index of these sucks pages at 
www.joemaller.com/sucks/why_sucks.html. The page is a couple 
years old and most of the links don't work anymore. Darn. I 
really wanted to know why Detroit sucks. 

The page does supply a link to AltaVista that lets you find 
other sucks pages. If you click on it, you get your standard 
listing of anti-AOL and Windows sites. About 40 items down 
you get an interesting link "Why the 'Joy Luck Club' Sucks" 
(www.primenet.com/~awong/writings).

I really liked this heartwarming film about the Asian 
experience in North America. I was expecting the page to be 
some troglodyte's flame bait. What I did find was reasoned 
and thought provoking.

I guess I won't be putting up a "Why the 'Joy Luck Club' 
Sucks Page Sucks" page. Say that eight times fast.

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