Consumers fight corporations on Web, but protests costly

In this story: Ralph Nader to the rescue Suck.com founder: protest vital Victorious, but financially ruined Interview with Joey Anuff, co-founder of suck.com RELATED STORIES, SITES

By CNN Technology Correspondent Rick Lockridge

March 17, 2000
Web posted at: 7:20 p.m. EST (0020 GMT)

VIDEO CNN's Rick Lockridge looks at what's behind some Web sites critical of certain companies. Windows Media 28K 80K

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YUBA CITY, California (CNN) -- A California woman won a bittersweet legal victory this week against an extermination service that pestered her for years after she placed complaints against the company online.

Carla Virga's site is one of more than 1,000 angry consumer protest sites that have cropped up on the Internet, many with unprintable Web addresses. Some have legitimate customer complaints, others random belly aching.

Virga sued Terminix after discovering what she said was $20,000 worth of unreported damage in the walls and floors of her California home.

"We offered to settle for $7,500 so we could avoid litigation. They chose not to take that offer," she said.

After Virga created a Web site critical of Terminix, the company sued her twice, once for libel. Carla won. And once for trademark infringement for using the name Terminix.

The advocacy group Public Citizen, led by consumer activist Ralph Nader, helped defend Virga against the trademark suit.

"If Ralph Nader's group had not come forward to help me out, along with volunteer law firms, I would have lost by default," Virga said.

Public Citizen attorney Paul Alan Levy called the case a "relatively easy" one.

"If (Terminix) had criticism they didn't like, the response should be to speak to it, to rebut it, and not to prevent people from speaking their piece and getting their communications known to the general public," he said.

Levy said that the company's strong-arm tactics against his client backfired.

"Terminix had a bug about her, you might say. Terminix tried to suppress her before but the more it fought against her, the more interest she took in Terminix and the more she put up about Terminix, and the more other people communicated to her about Terminix."

Terminix's parent company dropped its trademark suit against Virga on March 8.

"Terminix believes in free speech, and we strongly support the ability of anyone to communicate their views on the Internet. This was simply a trademark issue," a company spokesman told CNN.

But what of many other companies that find themselves the targets of disparaging Web sites? Is it unfair that any angry customer who knows how to build a Web page can become a round-the-clock critic, visible worldwide?

Joey Anuff, the co-founder of Suck.com, doesn't think so. "Any company, be it AOL or Microsoft or eBay, that looks at a (protest) site and judges it to be unfair is missing the point," he said.

Anuff's popular Web site focuses on what he calls "sophisticated whining and crybaby journalism," which he calls essential to democracy.

"Our founding fathers were dissatisfied consumers, and there is a great deal of legitimacy to the idea of complaining about things you are dissatisfied with," he said.

As for Virga, she won the Web site war. But her legal fees from the nine-year-long litigation drove her husband and her into bankruptcy.

"It ruined our credit, but other people are losing their homes, their health and we are fortunate that all that happened to us is that we were financially ruined," she said.

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