************************************************************** * * * 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: * * * * * ************************************************************** 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.