Air France Lawyers Holding Domain Name, AirFranceSucks.Com

By Aero-News Senior Correspondent, Kevin R.C. "Hognose" O'Brien

Exercise for the reader: go to the domain, www.airfrancesucks.com.

You get a notice, in French and English, from "Meyer and Partners, Intellectual Property Lawyers," that they have reserved the page on behalf of a client.

The unnamed client is, of course... Air France.

According to a complaint resolved before the World Intellectual Property Organization earlier this year, "The Complainant is Societe Air France, Roissy CDG Cedex, France, represented by Meyer & Partenaires, France."

The haughty French airline didn't, of course, set up its own "sucks" domain. But neither did any Air France critic. The page apparently was set up by domain speculators, who may have intended to sell it to such a critic, or blackmail the airline with it. They never did sell it, but pointed it at link-list sites, in a probable attempt to drive traffic to sites with advertising benefiting the speculators.

Instead of dealing with the speculators, Air France took the dispute to the corporate-friendly halls of WIPO. In a previous dispute in 2001, WIPO failed to allow Lockheed Martin to suppress "lockheedsucks.com" and "lockheedmartinsucks.com," but since then WIPO has more consistently taken  positions critical of free speech and hostile to corporate critics.

The WIPO now usually resolves domain disputes in favor of large corporate litigants, and has awarded several other "...sucks" domain names to the company criticized.

Acquiring negative domain names to prevent their exploitation is nothing new. For example, US civil rights groups have acquired several domain names based on racial pejoratives or insults, to prevent actual racists from deploying sites on those links.

Boston Mayor Thomas "Mumbles" Menino's minions bought up armloads of domain names when they heard that Menino nemesis, local columnist and talk show host Howie Carr was planning to put a treasure trove of Menino malapropisms online. (They missed mumblesmenino.us, where Carr shows off the inarticulate mayor at his worst). Vegetarian radicals PETA took a domain name from a spoof group, People Eating Tasty Animals. And corporations often try to shut down critical sites: in our own industry, United Airlines's many attacks on line-basher www.untied.com are legendary. And now this.

The French, God bless 'em. They might not have St.-Exupery any more.
They might not have the Concorde. But they have firm control of airfrancesucks.com.

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas l'aviation.

FMI: www.airfrancesucks.com