This post originally appeared on Business Insider.
Starting March 30, you’ll be able to buy a .sucks name for your website—if you can afford the prices of up to $2,500, as MarketingLand reports.
Vox Populi, the company that will be selling the .sucks website names, will charge $2,500 for certain registered trademarks with a .sucks name. For your own, nontrademarked usage (like MattWeinberger.sucks), it’s $199 until June 1, when the price goes up to $249.
There’s some controversy amid the buildup to the release of .sucks domains. Before he left office, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia called Vox Populi’s pricing plan “little more than a predatory shakedown scheme” designed to gouge companies who will rush to buy their own names to defend against trolls and other Internet mischief-makers, reports MarketingLand.
(Just as an example of what companies should be worried about with “.sucks,” check out the very unofficial Walmart.horse website.)
Consumer advocate groups will be able to buy a subsidized .sucks domain for only $9.95 per month, but they won’t be able to use it for a website criticizing a company. Instead, Vox Populi will force users at this price tier to go to a discussion forum hosted on its own site, Everything.sucks.
For its part, Vox Populi says that by pricing domains in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, it’s stopping trolls and scalpers from buying them in bulk. As Ars Technica points out, using a .sucks website to criticize of a company is most likely protected under the law, as long as the site’s not libelous.
