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Comment by normloman | Hacker News Reader

Not extortion. Free speech. Freedom of speech means the freedom to criticize. As long as hate sites make clear that they are not affiliated with the thing they criticize, let them say what they want. If it's false information, sue them for libel. If it's true, get your shit together.

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the extortion part is heightened by the registrar for .sucks where it is asking organizations who own the trademark to pay 2500/yr to get a domain name

The possible upside is that if it's trademarked, no-one else should be to register the domain name either. However, that all depends on the rigourousness of the registrar...

Except that's not the case. The .sucks registrar is selling the trdemark-related domain for $10/y to someone who wants to criticize $Trademark, while it would cost $TrademarkCompany $2500/y.

You can buy $yourname.sucks for $200/y, but someone who wants to criticize you can buy it for $10/y.

Tiered pricing that charges more to people who aren't looking to disparage themselves is predatory.

> Tiered pricing that charges more to people who aren't looking to disparage themselves is predatory.

Or its bribery to prevent free speech.

it ought to be illegal to discriminate between buyers - it should either be open season auction, highest bidder wins, or a flat price for everything, but with trademark disputes process.

Ah, I didn't realise they had tiered pricing, I thought it was just $2500 across the board. I guess I must read the articles a bit more closely. I can't imagine that this will go well for the .sucks registrar in court - looks like plain extortion to me, although IANAL of course ;)

That's hilarious. How did that get past the ICANN process?

ICANN has a process?

No, really, they're just making stuff up as they go along. The idea of this kind of "extortion" has been around for decades, since the early rounds of DNS root name expansion.

Sure they have a process! You pay them the $185k application fee, and you get your TLD. That's a process, right?

Ah, yeah true. At least no one's forcing them to buy.

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