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Bullshit. AOLSucks.com wouldn't have the impact without "aol" being part of the domain name. They successfully defended the domain under the auspices of fair use.

Just because the letters aol are part of your domain name doesn't give AOL the right to stomp down on your ass - even if the subject of your site is related to AOL.

If you're up to something infringing on their trademark like trying to make money off their good name, then yeah you're violating their mark. But this doesn't.

IANAL, but you should get one. They're really not all that expensive. Stand up to the bully. Tell AOL to fuck off.

I agree strongly with this. Whilst it is a shame that they feel they have to censor the net, what we should be pleased about is that they have actually allowed it at all. I was at Gitex (the major Gulf region IT show) in 1997 and met people from Saudi and Iran whose only link with the 'net was international dial-up accounts - many with AOL (which is worse? aol or censorware?).

In brief, I think that hoping for the Internet to create a more open world is hoping for too much. The good thing is that it is beginning to make parts of the world less closed.

Yeah right. Its like that crap RealPlayer. When I installed it, it specifically had options for whether or not you want RealPlayer to run on startup and sit in the taskbar. I *made sure* that this option was not selected. It completely ignores the option, it runs on startup anyway and sits in the taskbar.

You think that's bad? An older version installed AIM on my computer once. I don't want any of AOHell's crap on my computer. I don't use Nutscrape. I don't use AIM or ICQ (or any other messaging system, for that matter...last time I used IRC was probably a decade ago). I don't use Winamp anymore (tho' it was pretty cool before Nullsoft got swallowed up). I fired off a nastygram to Real about it, and it seems that it's not in current versions (at least not in the basic download that's available).

Since Linux is in it's (desktop) infancy, where is the shell for Mom and Dad? My copy of Mandrake looks a lot like W.95, but really, it was never written for Grandma/Grampa to use for E-Mail...

As long as Unix is written by Geeks for Geeks it's Never going to be mainstream. (Maybe Good, Maybe Bad. How many of us would still sit around chatting it up if it was as easy and prolific as AOL?)

[3] set policy. "First come, first serve." (that's it. done.)

Alright cool I will be the first. I claim every single domain name that can exist. You can rent these domain names from me at $100 a year.

[4] Convince big name ISPs to point to these root servers. (extremely difficult)

It would be really difficult to convince AOL to change if aol.com takes you to aolsucks.com

I think that this move should be opposed in all ways, shapes, and forms, especially through the Internet. It's far and wide known that AOL sucks, but now Steve Case wants to add Time Warner's armada of their news (television and print), movie, and music divisions to his already bloated coffers. Meanwhile, AOL is getting hacked at least once every week, be it breaking into user records, making more spam, or just plain old flaming in the chat rooms. Nevertheless, AOL wants to launch their broadband service (which, not surprisingly, will STILL get a >400ms ping, compared to the For now, the outlook is bleak, as the conglom-o of TimeAOLWarnerTurner threatens to alienate the multimedia world, its tendrils gnashing away at the consumers' rights.

After reading a fair amount about the M.I.T. case, I understand why it can be considered offensive to have a validly registered net name taken from you by a big corporation. But surely this is just one aspect.

Anna Friel (a Uk actress) has a website, but it had to be hosted on a different URL than www.annafriel.co.uk because that name had been taken by a pr0n site. I think she got the URL back, and I think that any legislation that would have made that any easier is a good thing.

How should the law be formulated in order to prevent abuse of a trademark, acknowledging that big corporations have a right to market their names on the internet and protect any equity they have built up over time, whilst at the same time protecting the small company or the individual from having their web address taken from them?

Everything I read on this issue offers up a lot of criticism of the law, the big corporations, but very few proposed solutions that don't end up being to someone's detriment.

The article mentions that the bill might be used to prevent net names such as AolSucks.Com from being registered. Since that one actually exists, is there a real threat there and could the bill be used in this way?

• DARE Sucks
• AOL Sucks
• Netscape Sucks