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Brazil and Peru Dispute .Amazon TLD
judgecorp writes "Amazon.com could lose the .amazon domain, as Brazil and Peru have disputed the retailer's application to ICANN, backed by other South American governments, who want to protect use of that domain for 'purposes of public interest related to the protection, promotion, and awareness raising on issues related to the Amazon biome.'"
Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline have expressed no interest whatsoever in the .microsoft TLD.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
The silliest part about custom TLDs is that because they're so obscure, you have to put "http://" in front of them for people to recognize them in the wild. Replacing "amazon.com" with "http://amazon" is a net increase in number of characters, defeating any benefits that may have come by avoiding the TLD. I guess if you're starting with ".org.uk" or something similar it's neutral, but a lot of countries abbreviate the category part to two characters (.or.jp, .co.uk, etc), making the addition of "http://" still worse.
Unless it's 2002 again and we're suddenly writing out "www." for everything?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Well, no. The name Amazon long pre-dates the river, being the name of a mythological tribe of warrier women who removed a breast so they could better shoot a bow. "Amazon" comes from the Greek a-mazos, "without a breast."
.amazonriver, if they wish.
The countries in the Amazon River basin have a no more legitimate claim to the domain than does the company. Let them use
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
In related news, big number mathematicians are considering whether to dispute the .google TLD.
Which help sort out the stupid mathematicians from the ones that know what a googol is.
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When ICANN proposed this new TLD concept, this is exactly what people were saying would happen. The entire point of the original domain name system was that it was hierarchical, so that terms like "amazon," which were ambiguous, were not in contention. It is clear that amazon.com is a commercial company while amazon.pe is the river in Peru. If you give one trademark holder the entire hierarchy, the system falls apart.
At the risk of being trollish by linking to my own Slashdot comment:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2782577&cid=39661791
The blame for this is on certain browser developers (*cough* MS *cough*). There is no technical reason why "amazon" couldn't be a host, but IE stupidly assumes that when you enter a single word, you want to search for it.
Psst... don't look now, but Firefox, Chrome, and Opera all do the same thing. But don't that stop you from following in the /. tradition and singling out MS.