Bank of America has generated way more bad publicity for itself and
its executives than sites built on these domains ever would have.

(Who on earth would want to go to annemfinucanesucks.com? No normal people even know who Anne M Finucane is. In case you're curious, she's Bank of America's chief marketing officer. That's her in the middle of the picture to the right, with Sandy Weill and some other fellow.)

But
now at least we know the reason Bank of America ordered some minion to
think of and buy these hundreds of domain names--and probably paid him
or her hundreds of dollars an hour to do it.

The reason?

A site called BANKOFAMERICASUCKS.com.

Bank of America doesn't own that URL, although it presumably wishes it did.

BANKOFAMERICASUCKS.com
is "the official Bank of America consumer opinion site." It's a forum
you can go to to read and rant about how horrible Bank of America is. 
Unlike annemfinucanesucks.com, it's a site you might actually think of
searching for if you were feeling like reading or ranting about how much
Bank of America sucks.

BANKOFAMERICASUCKS.com
is, helpfully, organized into topics, so you can go rant and read about
whatever Bank of America product you're particularly pissed off about.
It's also home for a big, energetic community of similarly enraged Bank
of America customers, so you can always find someone else to co-miserate
with.

(When we visited this morning, there were 24 angry people there.)

Anyway,
now that Bank of America has revealed its intention to try to corner
the market on URLs that could be used to host sites that are critical of
Bank of America and its executives, the value of BANKOFAMERICASUCKS.com just went way up.

So if we were the lucky owner of BANKOFAMERICASUCKS.com, we might think about cashing in on that.

We'd guess that, between the cost of domain name registration
and minion-time, Bank of America has probably invested $10,000 or more
in its URL-acquisition campaign. We'd further guess that Bank of America
would be willing to pay all that and more for the granddaddy of
Bank-of-America-sucks domain names: BANKOFAMERICASUCKS.com 

So if we owned BANKOFAMERICASUCKS.com, we'd probably probably ask for at least $100,000...