Parisi, working from a small office in Secaucus, N.J., is playing an increasingly important role in the ongoing debate over Web addresses. On Tuesday he won the right to the domain name MichaelBloombergsucks.com, which he's owned since 1999, despite the efforts of the New York mayoral hopeful to stop him. ICANN -- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -- the international nonprofit corporation that usually oversees such disputes, was also helpless.

If ICANN is a ship lost in the stormy seas of domain registration, Parisi is the shark circling below. A sharp critic of the much maligned organization, Parisi only surfaces when one of the domains he owns, like MichaelBloombergsucks.com, comes under fire. Meanwhile, while others debate the merits of certain suffixes, and wring their hands over who would own what URL, Parisi simply collects them.

To date, he's amassed NYTimessucks.com, Giulianisucks.com, Pepsisucks.com, TacoBellsucks.com, Nikesucks.com, NBAsucks.com, AceHardwaresucks.com, OprahWinfreysucks.com, HomeDepotsucks.com, RalstonPurinasucks.com and more than 600 others. Parisi has spent $100,000 on his Sucks.com sites, and a little less than that defending them.

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Type in a Parisi-owned sucks address and you'll arrive at Sucks.com, the clearinghouse site where Parisi has built a veritable super-picket line with hundreds of complaint forums to join. Bash Bush in the Government Sucks forum, Netscape in the Netscape Sucks forum, Jennifer Lopez in the Jennifer Lopez Sucks forum, the entire nation of Ukraine in the Ukraine Sucks forum and on and on. Even companies or organizations whose sucks sites Parisi doesn't own get dissed here, in forums like RIAA Sucks or McDonald's Sucks.

Depite the success of this teeming monument to disgruntlement, Parisi -- who, prior to the Internet boom made his living as an environmental consultant and asbestos remover -- is still searching for ways to finance Sucks.com. At the moment, the money comes from WhiteHouse.com, which Parisi has built into a popular porn site. But, now that it's legal, online gambling may prove to be the next source of funding. "For some reason," muses Parisi, "the connotation of the porn is a lot worse than the gambling. You don't see politicians at porn conventions, do you?" In any case, it might help Parisi improve his standing among ICANN officials, not that he cares too much about what they think.

Parisi spoke to Salon from his New Jersey office, where he reveled, briefly, in the Bloombergsucks.com victory and plotted a name change for Sucks.com.

So you won the rights to the MichaelBloombergsucks.com site.

The site doesn't really make much money, so if you win, it's good for other people who use the site, but it doesn't really do anything for us, you know.

I didn't think [the court proceeding] would be as nasty as it was. This was actually a really nasty case. If you run a site like Sucks.com, there's obviously going to be stupid things posted there, and they tried to sue [on the grounds that] those things being posted on the site as showing that we're tarnishing them. There's like 100,000 posts on the [MichaelBloombergsucks.com] Web site, so one-tenth of 1 percent of them -- you've got some idiots posting them.

But these ICANN people who rule these cases are screwy anyway. They rule any way they want.

One thing about us being involved in these sucks things is that at least we've won two cases. There's been like 20 of these sucks cases that have been in front of ICANN and almost everyone else has lost. We won this one and we won the one against Lockheed [for Lockheedsucks.com]. The third is WalMartsucks.com -- he won.

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