When the folks at Bitch Magazine decided to take off into Google's cloud, they were quickly brought down to Earth.
The culprit: an opaque Google censorship system that simply won't let you register certain domains for its e-mail, web hosting, and groupware service.
Bitch Magazine -- a feminist magazine that's been publishing out of San Francisco and Portland for the past 17 years -- wanted to dump its Thunderbird desktop e-mail software for Gmail. But when it tried to make the move, Google apparently found the company's Bitchmagazine.org internet domain unacceptable.
"Our technology director went to register our domain name and found out basically that we wouldn't be able to have e-mail addresses with that domain name," says Kate Lesniak, Bitch Media's development director.
Bitch Media has launched an online petition trying to get Google to change its mind.
No doubt, bitch is a loaded term, but the magazine seeks to take away its pejorative power. "We'd really like to be able to use it like we'd use it in our magazine," Lesniak says. "It's not necessarily a bad word, and we want to reclaim it for feminists."
Or, as the petition says: "When it’s being used as an insult, 'bitch' is an epithet hurled at women who speak their minds, who have opinions and don’t shy away from expressing them, and who don’t sit by and smile uncomfortably if they’re bothered or offended. If being an outspoken woman means being a bitch, we’ll take that as a compliment."
Lesniak and crew aren't the first people to run afoul of Google's domain-name policing system.
A quick search through Google support posts reveals a long line of frustrated bloggers and entrepreneurs with websites such as Mashitup.be, Vansuckling.com, and Stupidfunclub.com.
Tested Wednesday, none of those domains could be used with Google Apps. They return the fuzzy error message: "Google Apps does not currently support this domain name."
But Bastard.com was accepted. No problem.
Google doesn't seem to maintain a list of banned terms, but last year, a software developer named Jamie Wilkinson got a hint of the words Google doesn't like. He published a list of banned terms in Google's "What Do You Love," mashup page. This list of mostly horrific obscenities includes many of the terms banned by Google Apps, but it's not a perfect match. For example, bum is banned, but bumpkin.com passes muster at Google Apps.
We contacted Google for a comment on this story Tuesday. By Wednesday evening, they still didn't have anything to say.
Google's prohibitions have caused some problems for customers -- mostly for people who want to use a trademarked term such as Google in their Apps domain -- but it's not been a big deal for most customers, says David Hoff, chief technology officer with Google Apps consultancy Cloud Sherpas.
Lesniak realizes that Google is in a tough position. Clearly, this is a word that is often used in a nasty and inappropriate way. Lesniak herself also uses the b-word.org domain for her email, because so many mail filters will block messages coming or going to bitchmagazine.com.
But she thinks there's room for Google to do better. "I think they should re-evaluate the use on a case by case basis," she says. "Ultimately we're not pushing for broad changes, but we would like them to realize that there are other ways to use the word bitch."
Photo: Kristin Rogers Brown, Bitch Magazine
