Tim Cook knows that haters gonna hate, hate, hate. Photo: Apple
Apple sucks! Or at least it does according to its most recent purchase: the domain name Apple.sucks, which the company has shelled out the cash to acquire.
Operated by the company Vox Populi, the .sucks suffix will cost users $2,499 per year to acquire.
CEO John Berard thinks it’s a way to get companies to engage with their customers. Another way of looking at it is that it’s a bit of a shakedown racket, since no self-respecting brand (particularly one with as many people gunning for it as Apple) is going to let theirname.sucks stay in the wild for long.
Apple’s not the only company to buy embarrassing web domains to stop them falling into enemy hands. Hersheys, Monsanto, Citigroup, and Kevin Spacey have all bought their respective .sucks domain, although the existence of the suffix to begin with has already come under fire — as has the apparently “predatory pricing.”
Other controversial web addresses in the past have included .porn and .adult.
Paying $2,499 is nothing to Apple, of course, but it’s understandable why it’s keen to take such a derogatory web address off the market. When your rivals are immature enough to hide pictures of your logo being urinated on in their mapping software, you know you’re not dealing with the most highbrow of wits.
Sorry, Samsung and Google — you were too late on this occasion!
Luke Dormehl is a UK-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems, And Create More and The Apple Revolution, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme, and other publications. He’d like you a lot if you followed him on Twitter.
(sorry, you need Javascript to see this e-mail address) | Read more posts by Luke Dormehl.