Dot-Amazon spat latest: Brazil tells ICANN to go fsck itself, only 'govts control the internet' In an effort to block Amazon from getting the top-level domain .amazon, Brazil may have put governments on a crash course with the private sector over control of the web. In an aggressive and contradictory letter [PDF] on Wednesday to the overseer of the internet's domain name system, ICANN, Brazilian technology minister …
@Richard - you nailed it.
There is no reason for the company to have dot-amazon. It's just polution.
I'm just waiting for the day when enough organisation re-zone all these new toplevel domains, by shoving them under a catchall tld... (.alt maybe?) that they become useless used in any other form.
"There is no reason for the company to have dot-amazon. It's just polution."
I fully agree. Why would Amazon the company want a global domain anyway? They restrict access to users in various countries and re-direct them to their local ccTLD in many cases so a global .amazon TLD would almost certainly end u[ being used almost elusively as us.amazon, uk.amazon, fr.amazon, de.amazon, br.amazon etc. etc. etc.
And Amazon the rain forest and river, pre-dates Amazon the company by several million years, so they should take precedent.
The whole argument from Brazil is wrong, even though I feel the .amazon TLD, if it is approved at all, belongs to Amazon, the natural phenomenon and not the company.
Yes, this was a perfect example of why new TLDs should never have been created. The previous structure with countries having their own and a .com, .org, .edu and mostly redundant .net was fine.
I get why countries that arrived late to the internet party weren't happy that US companies had already land grabbed many of the "prime" .coms that were simple words for what people wanted, but by the time they finally approved the new TLDs internet search had rendered those rather pointless (could 'business.com' sell for anything close to what it did back in the day?)
The ones who are late to the party *always* complain.
Since it was all US Money that paid the development and deployment costs for what developed into the "World Wide Web" it's only natural that US Companies staked out the choicest territory.
Brazil's complaining is why it's difficult for the world to have "nice toys" for very long.
Seems I recall the naysayers predicting something similar to this happening when ICANN came out from under the protective wings of US control.
"Since it was all US Money that paid the development and deployment costs for what developed into the "World Wide Web" it's only natural that US Companies staked out the choicest territory."
Ooh, I wonder if that applies to other things? I think the whole of the US either belongs to the UK or to the native Americans (you know, the real ones) under that argument. And anyway, if these companies are in California, aren't they Mexican? Oh, you mean the US stole California from Mexico? Is that natural too?
"Brazil's complaining is why it's difficult for the world to have "nice toys" for very long."
Well, no. The world didn't have the nice toy, it was the US that had it, and it didn't want to share. It even didn't want to share when it had stolen a toy (in this case, the name Amazon) from the rest of the world in the first place.
"Since it was all US Money that paid the development and deployment costs for what developed into the "World Wide Web" it's only natural that US Companies staked out the choicest territory."
That's odd, thought a British guy invented "The World Wide Web", the yanks invented the internet. They are not the same thing.
While the World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, it should be noted that services on the Internet such as FTP and E-mail, which pre-date the Web, also use the domain name system, which is what is really at issue here.
Of course, it's not really as if U.S. companies grabbed up all the good domain names back when they would have had to use them for Gopher sites, so I can't be sure if this point is quite as relevant as it seemed to me it might be.
The main reason for folks to ban the stupid top level domains is because it makes it easier for me to block the single domain.
All I need is what I already have is to point the domain to my new zone.
amazon. IN NS junkers.
Really, everyone should realize that due to spam, I am already blocking new top level domains in my spam filter. It is easy to allow the old TLDs and they block everything else. (Yes I know that with enough pull, I may have to change my filter rules.)
But if a country is "late to the party" and all the good .coms have gone, it stands to reason that that countries own top level country domain will be dominant instead.
People would get used to it.
E.G. If *every* UK company was under *.co.uk then people in the UK would "know" that the company they wanted would end with that suffix.
It would actually be easier... At the moment, even my mum knows of .com and .co.uk (but probably not why tescos is .com whilst sainsburys is .co.uk)
So any international company that wanted to sell to people in the UK would need a .co.uk, and if they only had a .com people in the UK would assume they don't do business there?
The web address is unimportant, I'll bet most people who want to go to apple.com to look at iPhones just type 'apple' in their address bar. If there was already an apple.com back in the day and Apple was forced to use 'applecomputer.com' it wouldn't matter today. The address bar search would direct them to where they wanted to go.
These days some local companies have pretty ridiculous URLs because if your business was called "Johns Refrigeration" there could be a hundred of those worldwide. So if you assumed your local guy got "johns.com" or "johnsrefrigeration.com" you'd be wrong - unless you live in Arizona.
In Chicago maybe your guy is "johnsrefrigerationchicago.com" if you're lucky (and want to type all that) but you'd find it isn't and have to search anyway. Even if there was a TLD "refrigeration" there could still only be one johns.refrigeration so that doesn't help you. If there was a TLD "chicago", there could be only one johns.chicago and it might be a pizza joint or clothing store. Internet search (assuming it isn't gamed by SEOs) solves the problem better than anything else so far.
"In Chicago maybe your guy is "johnsrefrigerationchicago.com" if you're lucky (and want to type all that) but you'd find it isn't and have to search anyway."
Of course, John as a local company, could go with the .us tld and possibly a state abbrev. sub-domain below the TLD eg johnsrefridgeration.ill.us .us seems to be remarkably underused.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a commercial business using one of the xx.us state codes, it may be against the rules - they probably figured that's what .com was for. By the time the internet exploded everywhere already associated .com = business so they wouldn't use .us even if they were allowed to do so.
Besides, then you run into issues in cities that straddle a state line - which state do they register in, or should they register in both and have one redirect to the other. .com was just easier, at least back when it didn't have 50 bazillion different domains in it.
True, but since the "Libya" of his time was essentially the entire Maghreb and their location isn't given precisely, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco could have an equally valid claim. Alternatively, one could also take the view that "Amazons" were actually a comic book version of the Scythians, which would give Ukraine and Russia precedence. Bezo's Bookshop has no more right to .amazon than a certain soft drinks company has to .co.ke (commercial, Kenya - in case it isn't obvious).
All of the above is true ... in the world of cartoonies.
Me, I'm just amused by the absurdity of it all.
Remember, all of USENET can be placed under net.* ... with no loss of signal. This is all about very, very fragile egos, nothing more and nothing less.
Or it could be that Brazil (a sovereign nation) offered BIGGER envelopes on the condition they IGNORE Amazon's. After all, one classic way to beat a bribe is with a BIGGER bribe.
Unless he's an "honest" politician. You know, "An honest politician is one that once he's bought, stays bought."
Apart from the fact that I personally think the new TLDs are a bad idea - I would personally side with Brazil on this one. "Amazon" as been a part of the lexicon describing the geographical area long before Amazon LTD even existed.
Tell you what: if ICANN is so keen on offering .amazonia to Brazil as a replacement for .amazon, why not offer .amazonltd (or .amazonco) to Bezo? See how keen he is on compromises then.
and before Brazil decided to squat on the [domain] name, the word "Amazon" had already been in use for literally THOUSANDS of years.
So.. following Brazil's line of reasoning, the .amazon TLD should be given to Greece.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazons
In Greek mythology, the Amazons (Greek: Ἀμαζόνες, Amazónes, singular Ἀμαζών, Amazōn) were a tribe of women warriors. Apollonius Rhodius, at Argonautica, mentions that Amazons were the daughters of Ares and Harmonia (a nymph of the Akmonian Wood). They were brutal and aggressive, and their main concern in life was war.
[...]
There's actually also the point that Amazon is only the English spelling of the river/region. In both spanish and portugese (the languages in Brazil and Peru) the name is Amazonas.
So they are complaining about a non-local name for a Region. So locals looking for a tld for the Region would have to look up a foreign word to find it. That seems crazy to me...
Obviously, there is no need. You know this. I know this. All the El Reg readers know this.
There's nothing they can do under .amazon. that can't be done under .amazon.com. , or even .amazon.some.deep.subdomain.com.
google searching for amazon will work whatever (*rolls eyes*)
I don't know why the big ISPs and technical bodies didn't just refuse to implement them. There's no legal or technical requirement to. It's just a money making scheme which flattens the DNS with a detrimental affect.
Without heirarchial name resolving, we'd be back to the naming schemes of DECNET, UUCP, and even the trusty old hosts file!
You might be tech savvy enough to construct a hostname like this. Most of the digital natives are not... and in the long run that's what will be around (us COFs succumbing to age and caffeine/alcohol abuse). Plus most mobile devices (noone uses real computers any more except us COFs) have "keyboards" that have ".com" or the local (locale ;) ) tld as a key. One additional touch? I guess one can manage...
Anecdote: one of my friends is a teacher. For his class (last year of school) that participated in the state's maths competition (they did well in the end) he gave out his email address: something@hisfirstname.lastname.net He also said he'd upload some additional course material to his homepage. Cue students: "and what's the homepage?"
Okay, when the Bezoses, Zuckerbergs and Gateses have enough power to create TLDs in their companys' names - amazon.com ain't good enough?! - too much power and influence is in the hands of these tech titans, who in time will make the finance crooks look like amateurs.
And the namespace is already a mess without this additional insanity. It went off the rails with the creation of .biz and all its siblings.
I guess he wanted a name that was already known, therefore memorable and near the top of an alpha listing. Many website listings were just lists in the early '90's. Altavista started in '95.
He choose to give a common name his commercial punt and name it after the river/region, so he has no right to claim priority over something that existed prior to his choice of name. It's not as if there wasn't a broad lexicon of names still available to register in '94.
If he wanted to rule the Internet, he should have registered internet.com or tat.com for that matter.
IIRC, internet.com was already taken at the time: I believe by one of the search engines, lycos or altavista. And tat wasn't really a word back then: not to mention it's at the low end of the alphabet and as you said, he preferred an A to be on top of alphabetical listings.
In practice, my browser autocompletes the whole address (e.g I type "the" and then I choose between www.theregister.co.uk and www.theonion.com), so I rarely have to type more than three letters. Rarely, I type the full name of the web site, and let google find what I mean.
TLDs are basically remains of a bygone era. They serve no purpose anymore. At best, they're a gimmick. In a better world, ICANN would have been forbidden to create any new ones.
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