US senator rejects 'sucks' as online neighbourhood

A high-ranking US senator has urged Internet regulators to pull the plug on a proposed online neighbourhood for website addresses ending in ".Sucks."
Senator John (Jay) Rockefeller argued in a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers yesterday that such an Internet zone aimed to compel companies to buy addresses for the sole purpose of preventing someone from using them.
"I view it as little more than a predatory shakedown scheme," the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee said in a letter addressed to the head of ICANN's board of directors.
Any benefit from such a new generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) would be far outweighed by its potential to be used to "defame" individuals, non-profit organisations and businesses, Rockefeller said.

He identified three companies vying for ICANN's blessing to run the domain with the expressed reasoning that such addresses would inspire debate and benefit consumers.
Rockefeller contended that the apparent business model aimed to get people, groups or companies to pay recurring fees to avoid having ".Sucks" appended to their names in website addresses.

One contender for running the domain is offering pre-registration of website names for USD 2,500, with a warning that the price will leap 10-fold when it is close to opening, according to the senator.
ICANN did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
New online neighbourhoods began opening in January with the arrivals of ".Guru," ".Bike" -- and even ".Singles."

Opening the Internet to domain names that go far beyond .Com, .Net, .Gov, and .Edu has been heralded by ICANN as the biggest change to the Web since it was created.
More than 100 new gTLDs have cleared hurdles to reach registries such as Donuts.