March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Companies buying Internet sites for names

BOSTON — That sticks-and-stones stuff to the contrary, names really can hurt, and some companies are gladly buying up the rights to them to keep them from falling into unfriendly hands.

Bell Atlantic bought the Internet addresses bellatlanticsucks.com and bigyellowsucks.com. (The company’s online version of the Yellow Pages is called Big Yellow.)

Bell Atlantic, which also acquired the phone company NYNEX, locked up the addresses after finding a site on the World Wide Web named nynexsucks.com.

It’s cheap insurance. Companies pay only $100 to register an Internet address and keep it for two years.

However, Bell Atlantic chose not to keep up its ownership of bellatlanticsucks.com, and the name has been bought by the company’s detractors.

There are too many possible derogatory terms to get them all, and the company is even likely to surrender bigyellowsucks.com, said John Johnson, a Bell Atlantic spokesman.

“We decided to focus on providing good service instead of closing all the avenues to make complaints,” Johnson said.

The new bellatlanticsucks.com page greets Web surfers with the headline: “Don’t let the name change fool you. Same Company, same bad Service.”

“I’m sure they are kicking themselves,” said Vid Jain, one of the Web site’s creators. He is chief creative officer of Thinking Media Corp., a New York online advertising agency.

Other businesses register offbeat addresses that surfers can follow to the company’s official Web sites. Procter & Gamble, for example, tries to cover all bases with 150 sites, including underarm.com, badbreath.com, dandruff.com and diarrhea.com.


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