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Amazon's Quest For Web Names Draws Foes

Posted by samzenpus on from the making-enemies dept.

quantr writes in with a story about backlash to Amazon's request for ownership of new top-level domain names. "Large and small companies are vying for control of an array of new Internet domain names, but Amazon.com Inc.'s plans are coming under particular scrutiny. Two publishing industry groups, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, are objecting to the online retailer's request for ownership of new top-level domain names that are part of a long-awaited expansion of the Web's addressing scheme. They argue that giving Amazon control over such addresses—which include '.book,' '.author' and '.read'—would be a threat to competition and shouldn't be allowed. 'Placing such generic domains in private hands is plainly anti-competitive,' wrote Scott Turow, Authors Guild president, to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, the nonprofit that oversees the world's Internet domain names. 'The potential for abuse seems limitless.'"

6 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. "But they gave us a LOT of money" replies ICANN by Looker_Device · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I mean a SHITLOAD of money! Did YOU give us a shitload of money?

    --
    Your political party doesn't care about your rights and only represents corporate interests.
    1. Re:"But they gave us a LOT of money" replies ICANN by toejam13 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Did YOU give us a shitload of money?

      That's clearly what this boils down to. This massive free-form expansion of TLDs is little more than a revenue generation scheme by ICANN. So the same sort of wild-west name grabs we saw with .com domain names will simply be repeated here, just on a larger scale.

      I'm sure that all of the new issues of domain squatting and trademark conflicts with/within these new TLDs will be addressed by ICANN, that is if you can get them to stop rolling around in their piles of money for a minute.

  2. New TLDs are a bad idea to begin with by Improv · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why are we considering new TLDs to begin with? We're taking a good, loose system of categorisation and throwing it away because... why exactly?

    --
    For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
  3. This langrab is by and for corporations by boorack · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Price for TLD registration has been set high enough to eliminate many (if not most) small businesses. This move pushes Internet into corporate hands even more.

  4. Re:What's the difference? by 1u3hr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah... but .com is only valuable because only a few of those top level domains exist. It's essentially the same thing, and GP's point is perfectly valid.

    No, it's not. ".com" is a company. The idea of the more descriptive TLDs, like eg ".museum". is that it implies that what you find at that site is a legitimate member of that group. So Smithsonian.museum will take you to the actual Smithsonian Institute. If Amazon owned ".book" they would work to make it imply that "Book_title.book" was the legitimate site for any book to have. Every other publisher and/or author would end up having to either pay Amazon to get this, or have Amazon links all over it. Or more likely, both. Amazon would effectively have a tax on every book published.

  5. Re:How about Amazon ... by gman003 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So obviously what we need is some way to distinguish commercial use of the name "Amazon" from the Brazilian or organizational use of the name.

    It is truly a shame that there is absolutely nothing like this.