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Amazon Becomes Domain Name Registrar

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the one-click-bwahahaha dept.

prostoalex writes "Internet's largest retailer is setting up a domain name registration business. Wall Street Journal recently found out that in December Amazon.com got approved as domain name registrar. According to people from ICANN, the registration included rights for .com, .net,. org, .biz and .info TLDs."

5 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Low margin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    With all the recent competition this became such a low margin business. I wonder what amazon expects to get from it...

  2. About time... by Mullen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I am not suprised at all.

    I use to be a member of the team that ran, maintained and added new domains to Amazon.com DNS's. While I won't tell you everything, I can tell you they did this to save money since Amazon.com owns something like 4,000 domains (Maybe less, maybe more).
    Just paying the money to be a registar and then not having to pay to register new domains and also not paying to re-register all the domain names they own will save them a lot of money.

    Smart move, IMHO.

    --
    Linux O Muerte!
  3. Domain Registration is second best net business by hillct · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Say what you want about Verisign, they had it right, and so it should come as no shock that Amazon.com has entered the domain registration business. Verisign operates in the two markets that are at the gateway to the net. they are the premier SSL certificate authority and the the primary (although far from the best) domain registrar. Amazon - as a well run business - is seeking to mazimize proffits so it follows that they would enter the domain registration business, since it has one of the highest margins of any known internet business with the possible exception of the sale of pornography, and, yes, sales of SSL certificates. If the bariers to entry int othe Certificate Authority weren't so high, I'm sure Amazon.com would have attempted entry into that market as well.

    --CTH

    --

    --Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
  4. Re:It will be good for innovation. by $$$$$exyGal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'll be they'll set this up to work closely with their ZShop businesses. Sign up as a Zshop business, and get your own domain for 8cents.

    --
    Very popular slashdot journal for adul
  5. Squatters by Brian+Kendig · · Score: 4, Interesting

    These days *anyone* can become a registrar, it seems.

    That's how cybersquatters can afford to snatch up tens of thousands of domain names the moment they expire. The cybersquatters aren't paying $35 to another registrar for each name; they're just putting out a couple of thousand bucks to become registrars themselves then they get to snap up as many newly-expired domain names as they want, for free.

    And then they easily recoup the couple of thousand bucks by finding people who didn't mean to let their domains expire, and extorting large sums of money from those people to give them their domains back.

    Cybersquatters are scum of the earth, second only to spammers.