Watch this jaw-dropping .sucks promo vid

Is .sucks just a domain name registry? A way to extort money from trademark owners?
No, it’s the about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, the kind of thing civil rights movement leaders including Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson could get behind.
At least, that’s the message in the jaw-dropping debut promo video for the new gTLD .sucks, which hits sunrise at the end of the month.
You may not instinctively associate registering a domain name with, say, Rosa Parks refusing to comply with Alabama’s racist segregation laws in the 1950s, but that’s what Vox Populi Registry is inviting you to do.

The video opens with stock news footage of MLK and various civil rights marches, accompanied by what seems to be audio from one of King’s speeches.
The video goes on to intermingle archive footage with nauseating B-roll padding, until we discover that none other than former US presidential candidate Ralph Nader loves .sucks.
He’s provided what seems to be an official endorsement, saying in part:

Most of the great changes in our planet’s history come from less than 1% of the people. For many changes in our country and the world, it’s a lot easier than we think. The word “sucks” is now a protest word, and it’s up to people to give it more meaning.

Nader is not as random a celebrity endorser as you might imagine. Fifteen years ago he wrote to ICANN to specifically endorse the creation of .sucks.
What do you think of the video? Clever? Inspiring? Funny? Tasteless? Offensive? Or just baffling?

Crocker caught with his pants down, literally, at ICANN 52

Here’s your daily WTF moment, courtesy of ICANN’s official YouTube account.
If you’ve ever wanted to see ICANN chair Steve Crocker without his trousers — and let’s face it, who hasn’t? — now’s your chance.

Don’t ask. I’m just as baffled as you.

Verisign sues .xyz and Negari for “false advertising”

Handbags at dawn!
Verisign, the $7.5 billion .com domain gorilla, has sued upstart XYZ.com and CEO Daniel Negari for disparaging .com and allegedly misrepresenting how well .xyz is doing.
It’s the biggest legacy gTLD versus the biggest (allegedly) new gTLD.
The lawsuit focuses on some registrars’ habit of giving .xyz names to registrants of .com and other domains without their consent, enabling XYZ.com and Negari to use inflated numbers as a marketing tool.
The Lanham Act false advertising lawsuit was filed in Virginia last December, but I don’t believe it’s been reported before now.
Verisign’s beef is first with this video, which is published on the front page of xyz.com:

Verisign said that the claim that it’s “impossible” to find a .com domain (which isn’t quite what the ad says) is false.
The complaint goes on to say that interviews Negari did with NPR and VentureBeat last year have been twisted to characterize .xyz as “the next .com”, whereas neither outlet made such an endorsement. It states:

XYZ’s promotional statements, when viewed together and in context, reflect a strategy to create a deceptive message to the public that companies and individuals cannot get the .COM domain names they want from Verisign, and that XYZ is quickly becoming the preferred alternative.

As regular readers will be aware, .xyz’s zone file, which had almost 785,000 names in it yesterday, has been massively inflated by a campaign last year by Network Solutions to push free .xyz domains into customers’ accounts without their consent.
It turns out Verisign became the unwilling recipient of gtld-servers.xyz, due to it owning the equivalent .com.
According to Verisign, Negari has used these inflated numbers to falsely make it look like .xyz is a viable and thriving alternative to .com. The company claims:

Verisign is being injured as a result of XYZ and Negari’s false and/or misleading statements of fact including because XYZ and Negari’s statements undermine the equity and good will Verisign has developed in the .COM registry.
…
XYZ and Negari should be ordered to disgorge their profits and other ill-gotten gains received as a result of this deception on the consuming public.

The complaint makes reference to typosquatting lawsuits Negari’s old company, Cyber2Media, settled with Facebook and Goodwill Industries a few years ago, presumably just in order to frame Negari as a bad guy.
Verisign wants not only for XYZ to pay up, but also for the court to force the company to disclose its robo-registration numbers whenever it makes a claim about how successful .xyz is.
XYZ denies everything. Answering Verisign’s complaint in January, it also makes nine affirmative defenses citing among other things its first amendment rights and Verisign’s “unclean hands”.
While many of Verisign’s allegations appear to be factually true, I of course cannot comment on whether its legal case holds water.
But I do think the lawsuit makes the company looks rather petty — a former monopolist running to the courts on trivial grounds as soon as it sees a little competition.
I also wonder how the company is going to demonstrate harm, given that by its own admission .com continues to sell millions of new domains every quarter.
But the lesson here is for all new gTLD registries — if you’re going to compare yourselves to .com, you might want to get your facts straight first if you want to keep your legal fees down.
And perhaps that’s the point.
Read the complaint here and the answer here, both in PDF format.

.ceo smartens up in new promo video

Struggling to find its tone?
PeopleBrowsr has done a full 180 in its attempts to market .ceo through online commercials.
In its latest video, the company has gone for a straightforward grey-hair-in-a-suit-addresses-camera concept.

It’s a far cry from its first attempt, published a year ago but now flagged as “private” on YouTube, which comprised PeopleBrowsr staffers dicking around the office in Donald Trump masks.
It also represents an evolution from the cartoony, but much more respectable, effort from February.
“The video was produced over many months – with feedback and collaboration from over 100 of our early adopter CEOs,” the company said.
Now, .ceo is being positioned as a “business card” for CEOs that enables social networking opportunities.
The gTLD, which went to general availability in March, currently has fewer than 1,800 domains in its zone file, though PeopleBrowsr pegs its number of registrations at “almost 2,000”.

Amazon and Google deal on .talk, .play, .drive and others

Google and Amazon have started making deals to settle their new gTLD contention sets.
Google won three contention sets against Amazon this week, judging by the latest withdrawals, while Amazon won two.
Amazon won .talk and .you after Google, the only other applicant, withdrew.
Neither company appears to have a “You” brand, unless you count YouTube, but the .talk settlement strongly suggests that Google Talk, the company’s instant messaging client, is on the way out.
When Google applied for .talk in 2012 it intended to give Talk users custom domains to act as a contact point, but in 2013 Google started to indicate that it will be replaced as a brand by Google Hangouts.
The withdrawal seems to suggest that the existence of a gTLD application, a relatively small investment, is not an overwhelming factor when companies consider product rebranding.
I wonder what effect a live, active TLD will have on similar decisions in future.
But Google won the two-horse races for .dev and .drive and after Amazon withdrew its applications.
Google has a product called Google Drive, while Amazon runs Amazon Cloud Drive. Both companies have developer programs, though Google’s is arguably the more substantial of the two.
Google has also won .play — Google Play is its app store — after Amazon, Radix and Star Registry’s withdrawals. Amazon does not have a Play brand.
Google has also withdrawn its application for .book, leaving six remaining applicants, including Amazon, in the contention set.
I don’t currently know whether these contention sets were settled privately or via a third-party auction.

Fiddy drops da C-bomb at .club launch party

Curtis ’50 Cent’ Jackson accidentally supported “.com” while he was endorsing da new .club gTLD at a launch party at a New York nightclub last night.
As previously reported, Fiddy is da first significant celebrity endorser of a new gTLD. He’s being paid to use 50inda.club, a web site developed by .CLUB Domains, as his new social media hub.
“In Da Club” was of course his breakthrough hit, in 2003.
He showed up at da Tao nightclub in New York — which had been rebranded “.CLUB” for one night only — last night for about 90 minutes in order to meet fans and pose for selfies, etc.
I was there. As disclosure, .CLUB had paid for my airfare from London, a night in a hotel, and copious amounts of alcohol.
I didn’t attempt to get into da roped-off VIP area where Fiddy was being held, but I gather that da bouncers guarding it were somewhat selective in who he got to meet.
He also publicly spoke, alongside .CLUB’s CEO Colin Campbell and CMO Jeff Sass, for about 30 seconds, in order to provide his official endorsement of da new gTLD.
Da problem was that during his brief address he referred to his support for “.com”, which is a little bit like a celebrity being paid to endorse Pepsi referring to how much he loves Coke.
Probably just a Freudian slip. We’ve all done it.
Unfortunately, I can’t give you da full quote just yet. It was quite noisy in there, and I’d consumed quite a bit of Cristal with diamond flakes floating in it. But a lot of people who videoed da address on their phones tell me it will be on YouTube shortly.
Fortunately for .CLUB, I don’t think what he said matters that much.
What matters is how frequently his people link to his new .club domain on his social media channels, how much mainstream media coverage his endorsement generates, and how many people register .club domains as a result.
Getting Fiddy as an anchor tenant will not have come cheap — my guess, and it is just a guess, is that da deal is costing .CLUB high six figures at least — so da company will have to sell a lot of domains to make it pay off.
UPDATE May 26: Here’s .CLUB’s video of da event. Fiddy says he’s very excited to launch his “50 in da .com club”. He later gets it right, referring to “.club” more than once.

Best anchor tenant ever? 50 Cent to use a .club

The American rapper Curtis ’50 Cent’ Jackson has become the first big-name celebrity to get in on the new gTLD game, announcing today that he’s launching a fan site on a .club domain.
He’ll launch 50inda.club at a .CLUB Domains launch event in New York on May 22, the registry has just announced.
‘In Da Club’ was the name of his breakthrough single in 2003.
A quote in a press release, attributed to Jackson, said:

As I prepare to launch `Animal Ambition’ on June 3 and my new drama `Power’ on Starz, the timing was right to give my fans a central web location to stay on top of all my latest news and social updates. I like to stay on the cutting edge, and 50inda.club represents the new wave of Internet names that actually mean something to me and my fans.

Fiddy has 7.41 million Twitter followers. That’s the kind of social media exposure not many other — probably no other — new gTLD operators have managed to achieve to date.
This, in my view, is a huge coup and is exactly the kind of thing new gTLDs need to be doing to get the word out about new gTLDs.

Disadvantaged kids need your money after terrible Name.com charity drive

Domain name registrar Name.com carried out what can only be described as a completely abysmal charity fund-raising drive during this week’s South by Southwest conference, and disadvantaged kids need your help as a result.
During the conference, Name.com got one of its more photogenic customer support guys to go around the streets of Austin, Texas, asking random passers-by to high-five him.
The high-fives were recorded on a great big electronic device the guy carried on his back. For every high-five he got, Name.com promised to donate a nickel ($0.05) to charity.
)
The campaign was videoed and published on the company’s blog (here, here, here, and here)
The end result of this was 10,000 high-fives, which raised an absolutely pointless $500 for the charity concerned, which is the Austin Children’s Center, a very worthy-sounding cause.
The Austin’s Children’s Center provides services for child victims of abuse in Austin, Texas.
But if you watch all of the Name.com videos linked to above, you’ll learn rather more about Name.com than you will about the charity it’s supposedly raising money for.
And all this effort raised a pathetic $500.
There are people reading this post who have regularly spent more than that on dinner.
During the final video, a representative of the charity, the Austin’s Children’s Center, says “We have to raise 65% of our annual budget, and this year it’s $7 million.”
So Name.com raised a whopping 0.007% of its chosen charity’s annual funding needs, while putting rather a lot of effort into attempting to raise its own corporate profile.
I gather that the highfive-counting electronic gizmo that the CSR carried around on his back in the videos costs around $1,200 to buy, meaning that the stunt actually ran at a loss.
Name.com could have donated an extra $1,200 to this charity if it had not run the stunt at all.
That’s assuming, of course, that it didn’t pay the guy carrying the camera, or the guy who did the editing, or the guy who wrote the blog post, or the guy who sent me the press release today…
This kind of crap makes me sick.
I donated $25 to the Center today in protest at Name.com’s bullshit.
If you want to donate in protest too, which I strongly encourage you to do, do it here.
Not many people have donated yet. This charity really does need your help.
If you’re not convinced yet, watch this video and then donate if you find it funny.

PeopleBrowsr tones it down in new .ceo vids

PeopleBrowsr, registry for the forthcoming .ceo gTLD, has eschewed the cringe in its new promotional videos.
No more company employees dancing around in masks to white rap; rather, straightforward animation with a voice-over explaining what .ceo is.
As I was so rude about the first (horrible, horrible) .ceo vid I feel duty bound to embed the latest, relatively boring one, too.

There’s another one here, too.

Go Daddy turns to man boobs for 2014 Super Bowl ad

For some reason people like watching Go Daddy’s Super Bowl commercials.
Here’s its 2014 commercial, which the company posted to YouTube today.
Rather than attempting to grab the viewer’s attention with fleeting glimpses of female décolletage, which has become the tradition over the 10 years Go Daddy has been running these expensive annual ads, this time around it’s the male form that’s being exploited.
Man boobs, in other words. Dozens and dozens of pairs of man boobs.
Danica Patrick’s in there somewhere too, but she appears to have been CGI’d to look like one of the fellers.

You’ll notice the lack of any TLDs — new or old — getting a mention, not even in Go Daddy’s logo, which dropped the “.com” about a year ago.
You may also scratch your head at the denouement. Why were a bunch of black guys among those racing to the tanning salon? Baffling.