South American nations open fire on ICANN for 'illegal and unjust' sale of .amazon to zillionaire Jeff Bezos Eight South American governments have vowed to make life difficult for DNS overseer ICANN after it gave the .amazon top-level domain to the US tech giant headed by Jeff Bezos. In a letter [PDF] sent on Friday, the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) responded badly to a missive from ICANN’s president saying it was …
They just need to wait. Average lifespan of multinational is 40 or 50 years, and Amazon has been around for half that already. Give it another 25 years, and the nations of the Amazon desert may be able to pick up the .amazon top level domain for peanuts.*
*Although peanuts might be a lot more expensive by then, since US production may well have been wiped out by the droughts and heat waves that will be normal across the southern US.
I can't tell if "nations of the Amazon desert" is a brainfart on your part, or a witty and scathing comment on climate change...
It was a comment on the continuing destruction of the Amazon rainforest, which as you observed both accelerates and is accelerated by climate change.
I doubt there will be much left of it in 25 years time except for a few old, forgotten David Attenborough documentaries.
It's actually dead simple to create another root DNS server that does this.
The problems for the rest of the internet are just as well known, but if it does happen this would be the first time a group of nation states have gotten pissed off enough with ICANN to do something about it.
It will actually be interesting to see what happens when a group of nation states basically declares war on ICANN.
With the unicode sorcery they used at RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags they could even use the logo with a->z arrow as the TLD. Who types URLs nowadays anyway?
I suspect trademarks would be the issue in using alt-Amazon names. But they could have been ama.zon. For me the root problem is the way new TLD's have been created out of thin bits as a form of extortion. Register your brands/trademarks in all these exciting new TLD's or someone else might. These new vanity domains have been very lucrative for ICANN, perhaps less so for the 'lucky' winners. I don't think I've ever seen or visited one of the new TLDs.
I think there are also issues with dispute resolution processes. I guess it's trickier when domains are for common words, but if you're SurrealEel Inc and have registered your trademarks, rather than going through vague dispute resolution processes, you might be able to use the courts. There's plenty of legal precedents and experience regarding IP and trademark/copyright, which is why a lot of new or old companies use made up words for their marks.
But balkanisation might be an outcome. The Amazon nations could legislate so ISPs have to direct customers to approved DNS servers that run their own .amazon zone. That would mean users in those countries can't access the 'official', ICANN approved .amazon, but that's too bad, and legal in those nations.
"I don't think I've ever seen or visited one of the new TLDs.
Some of them make sense such as .realtor. If you are an estate agent (and a member of the National Association of Realtors), the tld lets people know what you are about. It would simplify things if adult sites were .xxx with free priority access if you already have a your site with another tld. .DDS for dentists, .phd and on and on.
What I don't see as proper are companies clogging up the interwebs with .msft, .apple etc. They already have the domain names. .amazon should be reserved for the region along the Amazon river. The same thing for .nile and similar well known regions. This is akin to products with registered place names such as Champagne if anybody needs comparison in the real world.
Pfft! I've filed an application with ICANN for the gTLD .ICANN
Amazingly that isn't registered according to the list on the ICANN site.
How many extra sales are they going to generate from having https://uk.amazon rather than https://amazon.co.uk/ ?
My guess is, probably none, and if there is any change it would be in the negative direction.
Most of the "new" tlds have found there way onto peoples blocklists, because normal people don't use them, only spammers use them.
Why do Amazon care?
Because it will force retailers who sell through Amazon site to use a .amazon address for their main site and do its best to stop that retailer using any other address. Amazon will then have stats on numbers of people accessing those retailer's sites and use them against those that have 'suspiciously' high direct sales, and 'suspiciously' low sales through Amazon itself. I.e those it thinks are gaming the[ir] system by using Amazon for advertising but selling direct.
edit: Nevermind, @ArrZarr already said this much better than I have.
(original below)
I'm just spit-balling here, but maybe it's more of reverse domain-name squatting? Maybe they don't intend to use it in any meaningful way, they just wanted to stop anyway else from being able to use it, so it being put on blacklists may not bother them at all...
Why would they care? They're still getting the money.
The problem here is the PR failure - if the US government can't be trusted to side against a non-US corporation from time to time, then they can't really be seen to be benevolent DNS dictators for life.
To the above commenters asking why amazon.amazon etc is worth so much, please consider the effect of having any Tom, Dick or Harry able to create a domain that looks like offers.amazon/stuff or returns.amazon/stuff would have.
having an entire TLD of your company's name out in the wild would be damn near the worst case scenario for dealing with domain squatters, especially when your company is bigger than a lot of countries and will attract scammers like a candle to a moth (calls from "Microsoft" about your computer, anyone?)
changing www.amazon.co.uk to uk.amazon probably isn't going to happen, but not grabbing the TLD could go very badly for the company.
This is exactly why this was such a morally bankrupt money-grabbing move by ICANN to introduce all these new TLDs anyway. You *must* buy up all the variants of your business if you want to protect your customers from scammers and phishers setting up bankname.sillytld/login and their ilk, so it was guaranteed revenue for them for absolutely no benefit to anyone else.
Someone must be profiting!!
That 'someone' will be 123-Reg, who decided that I wanted to automatically buy the .uk version of all the .co.uk and .org.uk domains I have registered with them. Fortunately I pulled it before the transaction went through, but I suspect many were caught out and ended up buying domains they neither wanted nor asked for.
"Russia" and "serious preparations" in the same sentence is oxymoron the way things are currently done there. You perhaps mean "only Russia that makes serious noises"? That would be more the way things work there - make enough noise to cover government wasting another boatload of money and getting zero in return.
Balkanization produces few benefits and many problems. Instead of one corrupt organization which can't figure out what it's doing, we have a hundred or so. That's assuming the governments mandate it. If balkanization happens at the ISP level, then we have a thousand which, even if they intend to be compatible, won't be merely because they can't coordinate in time. We could try to freeze the system, establishing an acceptable state and saying that no changes to that framework will be accepted without unanimity (or close to it), but have fun trying to get people to agree on the acceptable state.
I'm pretty sure China could cope if the entire rest of the internet went down.
And that pretty much tells you all you need to know about 'balkanisation' as a solution. It's only possible in countries where the government holds complete control of the communications infrastructure, and countries like that aren't much fun to live in.
(Unless you always agree 100% with what your government gets up to, in which case you probably don't really know what said government is actually getting up to).
I am a bit confused.
In my day back when I was small TLDs were for:
- Companies (.com; .co.uk, etc)
- Countries (.uk;.es;etc)
- Organisations (.org)
Probably some other stuff I forggot cos I am now old.
So when they said "OK lets open up TLDs to more" I didn't think they meant to then sell any old TLD to anyone. I didn't thinnk they meant Amazon could have .amazon or IBM could have .ibm. It breaks the old model. Sure . . . .sex or .dating or .homefurnishings or .cars. But handing out a TLD to a company whose name happpens to coincide with a geographical region just seems like weird and not what th TLD structure is for. Its not for individual organisations. Its to give logical organisational entititties a TLD home.
Its for logic. It probably shouldn't havee been done anyway as the old logic worked and all they have done is given organisations an infinite number of TLDs thyy now need to buy to protect themselves from scammers.
First question on any IT project. Why?
The answer in this case seems to be "To make more money for ICANN"
Can you name a single dating site in .dating?
Can you name a single porn site in .sex
Can you name a single furniture store in .homefurnishings
Can you name a single car retailer or manufacturer in .cars
Probably some smartiepants will come up with some example that they've heard of, but for most people the answer is no.
Now suppose you were looking for one of these things, and had no idea where to look.
Would you:
randomly type in things like http://www.lesbian.sex , or http://british.homefurnishings and hope for the best, or would you use a search engine?
Search engines heavily weight urls with the search term in, so the examples you gave would actually work.
I seriously considered registering restore.house for a home renovation company; I was only put off when I realised it doesn't look like a website address in marketing materials; give it another few years and people may be more used to it.
"Can you name a single porn site in .sex"
I would be disappointed if great.sex didn't exist.
"Can you name a single furniture store in .homefurnishings"
Jesus, what a mouthful. Given a choice between that and something like dfs.co.uk, I know which I'd rather type.
Perhaps I ought to see if I can register the .goddamndifficultandoverlylong TLD?
To each thing in itself there is a Maximus, a Major and a Minor; and sometimes a Minimus. 300 years time supposing the internet exists, the River will still be there; maybe even the name --- but not the company.
How long do the greatest companies last ? In Britain, Europe or anywhere ?
I'm not sure whether your past post had specifics, but you need a better reason than that if you intend to prove we need to uproot something that works. As far as I'm concerned, neither group needs .amazon and I am content to let them fight about it. Meanwhile, our other DNS systems continue to work well nearly everywhere on the planet and on nearly every device in use. Based on this and other things, I'd be happy if we replaced ICANN with something a little nicer and a lot fairer, but I see no reason we need to replace our current version of DNS.
Why is everyone surprised that ICANN are printing themselves more money? It's all they have ever done. You should be able to register any TLD you want since all it requires is a DNS entry and you are good to go. Limit it to something sensible like no more than 16 characters and let the world go mad. That way you can have a TLD (if you get it first) of anything your heart desires. Personally I would like to register .faqu or .ferkewe or even .fokyu but I'm sure lots of other, less puerile ideas will abound. :-)
The whole limitation on TLDs was always a way to restrict supply and therefore push up the price. It has never been anything other than that.
And the risks of confusing names. And the pressures on people to register multiple versions of their domain if only to prevent scammers. And the sheer pointlessness of having thousands of categories in which to place things. If you're arguing for radical changes to how TLDs get assigned, having only one makes a lot more sense than having a functionally infinite supply.
I am tempted to start a clothing or rafting company called Mississippi and then go for the .mississippi TLD. rafting.mississippi, jackets.mississippi etc. I wonder if anyone in the USA would object.
I think it would be lovely if all rivers had their own. Volga, Yellow, Don, Danube...
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