It's interesting that they want .amazon specifically for tourism/commerical purposes, because it's the English spelling, which is not used locally.
Because if it were for locals, it would be .amazonia and .amazonas. (Similarly to how Germany is .de, not .gr or something like that.)
And not that tourism means they don't deserve the name... but it's not like this has anything to do with indigenous rights or a business trampling a people.
It's just a globally-known tourism business vs. a globally-known shopping business.
So not exactly something I can find myself caring about much. What do ICANN's rules already say? Does it go to whoever first registers, or whoever pays the most?
> It's just a globally-known tourism business vs. a globally-known shopping business.
Actually it’s a globally-known shopping business named after the afore mentioned globally known tourism business. Which I think is an important point.
If call your software company Barcelona, then you sort of need to accept that you aren’t on an equal footing when it comes to name ownership with the place you named your company after no matter how big you get.
Should the people who use an .IO domain name anticipate any input about how they do business from former residents of the Chagos Archipelago, or alternatively the British military?
But Barcelona refers to a specific city; a legal entity. They want the English word Amazon to refer to a group of regions, which are not one entity, who border the Amazon river (Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil). And they call that river either Amazonas or Amazona.
Furthermore, regions like this that have an official tld get a two letter tld like .eu for European Union. If they wanted to start an Amazonian Union and get a tld for it, they should! (maybe ".aa")
>>(Similarly to how Germany is .de, not .gr or something like that.)
Or how Österreich has a domain .at you mean? :P
There's already exceptions for this kind of thing all over the place. Russia has .ru despite not having a "u" anywhere in the name. Japan is .jp despite having nothing to do with Nippon.
Well Russian is typically not written in Latin script, similarly Japanese. I don't know of anyone who refers to Switzerland as the "Helvetic Confederation". If I had to compress the names of all of earth's countries (and many non-country entities) into two or three ASCII characters I don't imagine I'd have done much better.
I wonder how much of this is about avoiding collisions. .su would have been Soviet Union at the time. There are a lot of countries that begin with M, so I can see trying to avoid an M code for Hungary. There seems to be some precedent for steering countries away from common letters, if you read the tea leaves in the table (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2): there are lots of C countries, so Croatia ends up with .hr (from Hrvatska) and Chad ends up with .td (from Tchad), and the S countries are just a mess.
Amazon has offered them subdomains based on their country code, so .br.amazon for example. But they want to share access on the root domain, but that's not really how domain name systems were designed. They are designed to be hierarchical, so it makes sense for Amazon to grant full control of a subdomain to them rather than share.
Sharing would be a security nightmare also. Imagine any cookies set for
.amazon ? How would the browser share between amazon subdomains vs non if they shared the root?
Domain name systems are designed to be hierarchical, so it makes sense for Amazon to register within this hierarchy, which they already have, i.e., amazon.com.
The nations of the Amazon basin have a more complex situation regarding fitting within the hierarchy. Perhaps amazon.int?
>Because if it were for locals, it would be .amazonia and .amazonas
this assumes many, many things.
It assumes that locals do not communicate enough in English with anyone outside their locality that they can identify with the name Amazon.
It assumes that the local region does not have any interests other than tourism and commercial purposes about how their region is perceived external to the region.
If for example there was a .germany tld would you expect that the people of Germany might want to control it for something other than just tourism and commerce? I suppose they would want to control it even if there was a company called Germany somewhere in the world and Germany is stereotypically not so much into any language but German!
Amazonas is a state in Brazil (which does, admittedly, contain most of the Amazon forest - but is not the forest itself) and the Portuguese name of the river. The forest is called "Amazônia" in Portuguese.
I love how they offered $5 million in amazon kindles and hosting to them. How absolutely daft. Couldn't they just offer money? (Not that it's more likely to work, but the kindles and hosting was ridiculous).
When politicians and bureaucrats talk about shared governance what these parasites are really saying is that they want royalties for Amazon being named... Amazon.
I am a Brazilian (not that it is important) and I wished Amazon had .amazon (but made it available for others to use it too) without state actors influence.
> and I wished Amazon had .amazon (but made it available for others to use it too)
If only there was a way as a society we could make sure common resources could be used by interested and relevant parties in an agreeable manner. Maybe some kind of group that is formed based on the input of many people and will represent their interests in this matter and others like it. If only.
Also it's really silly for one private company to own an entire TLD just because that company choose to use a generic, commonly used word. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
> "globally, hundreds (if not thousands) of brands have names similar to regions, land formations, mountains, towns, cities, and other geographic places". These could be put off applying for new gTLDs because of "uncertainty" over ICANN policy over geographic names.
I guess I do not see why a company, especially one that already owns <companyName>.com, should find it necessary or feel entitled to register their brand or company name as a gTLD. In cases like this, it seems like the gTLD should be available in a way to reflect the broader meaning of the word.
I'd be okay with ICANN favouring the people from a place in any of these cases. The idea that American Airlines could own .america or that FC Barcelona could own .barcelona is much weirder than Apple owning .apple or something like that.
Having a limited set of gTLDs decided by ICANN etc didn’t really seem a long term solution either to me. ICANN itself doesn’t really seem like a solution for a truly global distributed network either, but that’s a whole other topic.
I’m not super excited about letting anyone who can afford to run a TLD make one either, but at least so far there appears to be relatively little mainstream appetite for using them.
ICANN’s UDRP already gives trademark holders huge leverage over cybersquatters, arguably too much power. Not sure we need much more in this regard. If you look at the UDRP’s case load, it’s extremely rare for trademark holders to lose a UDRP case.
All of these are examples of Brand TLDs (https://icannwiki.org/Brand_TLD), which can be registered as part of ICANNs New TLD program which started in 2012.
As many 'new' TLDs (such as the ones introduced in the 2000s such as .travel, .museum and .mobi), many of them are not used a lot, and many people are not familiar with them.
Yes. But note that it'll cost you about $1M per year to do this. There is no refund when you realise a week later that you have no purpose for .friendster or whatever, and you wish you still had $1M instead.
Several huge corporations bought the TLD for their long-winded name, and then it sits unused, because it's stupid. For example the TLD kerryproperties exists and is owned by the corporation Kerry Properties in Asia, but kerryprops.com is a much better name and so unsurprisingly the company's actual web site remains https://www.kerryprops.com/ and they just burn the money on the TLD for no reason.
They wouldn't use amazon.amazon obviously. Some options would include www.amazon, store.amazon, home.amazon, {product_category}.amazon, ec2.amazon, aws.amazon, etc.
See how we're using .google for some examples (which fortunately is a completely made-up word, hence no contentions).
I think the product category thing is most likely. They already do a form of {product_category}.amazon, except in reverse: amazon.{product_category}. See:
I don't get why Amazon would get control of the entire TLD. Can't these new TLDs be managed by some other entity which hands out domains to those that want them?
Readit News
Because if it were for locals, it would be .amazonia and .amazonas. (Similarly to how Germany is .de, not .gr or something like that.)
And not that tourism means they don't deserve the name... but it's not like this has anything to do with indigenous rights or a business trampling a people.
It's just a globally-known tourism business vs. a globally-known shopping business.
So not exactly something I can find myself caring about much. What do ICANN's rules already say? Does it go to whoever first registers, or whoever pays the most?
Actually it’s a globally-known shopping business named after the afore mentioned globally known tourism business. Which I think is an important point.
If call your software company Barcelona, then you sort of need to accept that you aren’t on an equal footing when it comes to name ownership with the place you named your company after no matter how big you get.
No, it was named after the Amazon river, not anything to do with tourism around the Amazon river.
Furthermore, regions like this that have an official tld get a two letter tld like .eu for European Union. If they wanted to start an Amazonian Union and get a tld for it, they should! (maybe ".aa")
Or how Österreich has a domain .at you mean? :P
There's already exceptions for this kind of thing all over the place. Russia has .ru despite not having a "u" anywhere in the name. Japan is .jp despite having nothing to do with Nippon.
But Hungary is .hu (not .ma or .mo for Magyarország), Finland is .fi (not .su for Suomi).
The ISO3166 code for Germany is DE.
e: is there something controversial about this?
One could also say it's a designation for a globally known, huge geographic area.
Sharing would be a security nightmare also. Imagine any cookies set for
.amazon ? How would the browser share between amazon subdomains vs non if they shared the root?The nations of the Amazon basin have a more complex situation regarding fitting within the hierarchy. Perhaps amazon.int?
But the internet is, to a large extent, English-centric, and so that's how things get named.
I'm sure you can find many more examples if you look.
this assumes many, many things.
It assumes that locals do not communicate enough in English with anyone outside their locality that they can identify with the name Amazon.
It assumes that the local region does not have any interests other than tourism and commercial purposes about how their region is perceived external to the region.
If for example there was a .germany tld would you expect that the people of Germany might want to control it for something other than just tourism and commerce? I suppose they would want to control it even if there was a company called Germany somewhere in the world and Germany is stereotypically not so much into any language but German!
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The country-specific TLDs are all ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, if I recall correctly. Germany's code in that spec is "DE", so that is what they were allotted.
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You're equating an industry with a singular corporate entity.
Same reason you get more trade-in credit for a giftcard then cash, hosting is "virtually" free, and kindles only cost production + shipping cost.
Not defending them, this is a useless offer, just offering another reason they'd have.
I am a Brazilian (not that it is important) and I wished Amazon had .amazon (but made it available for others to use it too) without state actors influence.
Please do not use derogatory terms like this, it poisons discourse.
There is absolutely no reason why they should be given rights on .amazon, a foreign word that doesn't exist in their own language.
If only there was a way as a society we could make sure common resources could be used by interested and relevant parties in an agreeable manner. Maybe some kind of group that is formed based on the input of many people and will represent their interests in this matter and others like it. If only.
Also it's really silly for one private company to own an entire TLD just because that company choose to use a generic, commonly used word. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
I guess I do not see why a company, especially one that already owns <companyName>.com, should find it necessary or feel entitled to register their brand or company name as a gTLD. In cases like this, it seems like the gTLD should be available in a way to reflect the broader meaning of the word.
There was nothing wrong with amazon.com and amazon.travel
.movie, .book, .museum, .news, etc.
This would have avoided this problem where you have “book-name-book.com” and “newblockbuster-movie.com” and so on.
I’m not super excited about letting anyone who can afford to run a TLD make one either, but at least so far there appears to be relatively little mainstream appetite for using them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Domain-Name_Dispute-...
https://icannwiki.org/.googlehttps://icannwiki.org/.microsofthttps://icannwiki.org/.applehttps://icannwiki.org/.foxhttps://icannwiki.org/.walmarthttps://icannwiki.org/.honda
All of these are examples of Brand TLDs (https://icannwiki.org/Brand_TLD), which can be registered as part of ICANNs New TLD program which started in 2012.
As many 'new' TLDs (such as the ones introduced in the 2000s such as .travel, .museum and .mobi), many of them are not used a lot, and many people are not familiar with them.
https://icannwiki.org/.apple
https://icannwiki.org/.google
...
The whole point of those "anyone can buy anything tld" felt like a scheme to force companies to buy "their" name.
http://blog.google http://about.google
Several huge corporations bought the TLD for their long-winded name, and then it sits unused, because it's stupid. For example the TLD kerryproperties exists and is owned by the corporation Kerry Properties in Asia, but kerryprops.com is a much better name and so unsurprisingly the company's actual web site remains https://www.kerryprops.com/ and they just burn the money on the TLD for no reason.
For just $1m a year you can buy some “insurance” that will stop that happening.
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See how we're using .google for some examples (which fortunately is a completely made-up word, hence no contentions).
http://amazon.party/ (party supplies)
http://amazon.dog/ (pet food, toys, etc.)
http://amazon.bible/ (bibles)
http://amazon.fail/ (support contact page)
and my favorite: http://amazon.horse/ (directly to the product page for a horse mask)
Or as a platform? https://shopify.amazon
Or even more confusingly! https://walmart.amazon
Trademarks can be enforced only in a specific context e.g. I can use "amazon" as a name for my cat or a restaurant but not an online marketplace.
Giving a whole TLD to a brand name is like giving an infinitely broad context to trademark.