Bank of America buying up offensive domain names | Hacker News Reader

Bank of America buying up offensive domain names

itworld.com

45 pointsabennett16 comments

Bank of America's budget vs Internet's creativity... I wonder how this will turn out?

I've seen numerous ideas, such as this, in many of the bigger companies I've worked for; the ones that come up with it seem to forget the fluid nature of the web. What they should worry about is the search ranking for any given url and heavily searched keyword search term - not the name of a url. That's just stupid.

bankofamericablowsgoats.com is available bankofamericamolestschildren.com is available bankofamericasucksdonkeyballs.com is available

The only way to win is not to play.

Or you can just lobby your representatives and have the DHS sieze any negative domain names.

And now, introducing godaddy's latest upselling effort...

That's kind of... pathetic.

It's actually a very common practice for companies to do this. Just whois xcompanysucks.com

sigh One of my previous employers tried to stem a growing flood of criticism by buying up universitysucks.com.

Surprisingly, when evaluating four-year degree granting institutions, most potential students don't first look to see if the institution has garnered a "sucks.com" domain.

The level of cluelessness just leaves me speechless.

Meh… Sounds like good practice. Same way everyone should buy the .com, .net, and .org of their domain. If you've got the money, (and BofA certainly does: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/16/bank-of-america-q1-...) why not do a little bit of defensive buying. Of course it's a helpless enterprise to get all possibilities, but it's not bad practice.

I disagree. It's not the domain registration fee, it's the executive time spent considering this strategy. If they don't have better things to do then they aren't earning their salaries.

Defensive domain registration does nothing (because there are infinitely many negative domain names) except signal that you are trying to cover up serious PR problems.

Too bad http://www.bankofamericasucks.com/ is already taken...and it's being used as a BoA complaint forumm.

Ironically, this forum is blocked by our proxy with the reason "denied by business request".

A commercial proxy, or something specific to your company?

BofA's Internal->Web filtering proxy.

Fuck that shit.

fuckbankofamerica.com is already taken.

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