Source: Here, Here, and Here
Tate & Lyle and Johnson & Johnson have been going on a domain sucking spree to get a variety of domain names that imply a negative association with Splenda, the chemical sucralose artificial sweetener.

The Domain Tools Blog writes, “Splenda wants to shortcut any free speech or backlash to their product by registering all the negative domains.” and explains how and why companies have been pro-active in buying domain names with negative association before any critics do. The list of domain names does indicate that Tate & Lyle and Johnson & Johnson have certain expectations of what that criticism is about given the names of the domains such as splendakills.com, victimsofsplenda.com, splendatoxicity.com, and many others.

And Darren concludes that “Image may be everything, but how does this look? ‘We know our product might be poison, so let’s prevent people from talking about it.’ It’s not an uncommon move by companies, but it’s just a waste of perfectly good corporate dollars.”

The SustainableIsGood Blog wrote “Judging by the domain names Johnson & Johnson and Tate & Lyle own it’s very clear they are concerned about people targeting targeting Splenda itself, or its main ingredient sucralose. The mere fact a major corporation and maker of a product has bought and owns domain names with their product name and the words “poison,” “kills,” and “sucks,” and “victims” is amazing. Under what possible scenario does Johnson & Johnson envision that someone would create the website “victimsofsplenda.com” This domain name and many others seem to go way beyond a company protecting its trademarks or copyright – these domain names imply a very sobering negative fear on the parts of Johnson & Johnson and Tate & Lyle.”

And then concludes with “It’s hard not to wonder – buying a handful of top level domain names to protect a company name or trademark seems reasonable but buying over 200 possibly as high as 300 negative domain names related to a product seems over the top. Is there something these companies know about Splenda that make them feel the need to buy all these domain names before someone else can? Who would ever imagine a website www.victimsofsplenda.com – honestly? Well apparently someone at Johnson & Johnson did because they now own the domain along with a host of others.”

Some of the domains listed include the .net, .org, .biz, .info, and .com variants of;

splendasucks, splendakills, splendatruth, splendapoison, thedangersofsplenda, thefactsaboutsplenda, thesplendadangers, thesplendafacts, victimsofsplenda, thetruthaboutsplenda, thesplendatruth, splendatoxicity, splendatoxicitycenter, splendavictims, splendahealth, splendaandyourhealth, splendaandyourfamily, splendamyths, splendaalert, splendafacts, splendasafety, truthaboutsplenda, splendasideeffects, aboutsplenda, allaboutsplenda, banonsplenda, bittertruthaboutsplenda, factsaboutsplenda, mythsaboutsplenda, officialsplendasite, splendadangers, splendadiabetes, splendaisnotsafe, splendaisnotsosweet, splendasucralose, thetruthaboutsplendasafety, sucralosepoison, sucralosekills, sucralosesucks, sucraloseandyourhealth, sucralosesafety, sucralosefacts, sucralosetruth, truthaboutsucralose, chlorosucralose, etc.

What none of the blog mention is that there is now a possibility that Johnson & Johnson and Tate & Lyle have not only registered these domain names to prevent others from getting those domains in order to provide information to consumers that may differ from the official and sugar coated (pun intended) marketing, but that they could be filling up all those domains with more marketing information in order to spam the search engines so that any less than glorious marketing and sales information regarding Splenda and Sucralose become harder to find or requires people to search on further pages.

A group of distributors of Tahitian Noni Juice had done that at one time by spamming search engines with a lot of pages with negative words associated with the juice, only to provide their own marketing spin and cure-all claims on the actual pages. This had worked for them for a short while until other sites took over the leading positions in search results as an offset and balance against the tsunami of marketing spam.