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Amazon Purchases .buy TLD For $4.6 Million

Posted by Soulskill on from the totall-just-short-of-free-shipping dept.

onproton writes: Amazon outbid Google at the ICANN auction this week for the top-level domain .buy , to which it now has exclusive rights, paying around $4.6 million for the privilege. Google was also reportedly outbid for the .tech domain, which went for around $6.7 million. No word yet on Amazon's plans for the new domain suffix, but it's probably safe to say amazonsucks.buy will be added to Amazon's collection of reserved anti-Amazon URLs.

2 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Uhm... can I block this? by The+New+Guy+2.0 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This makes no sense other than being a money grab... Amazon can now charge Barnes and Noble for bn.buy, or redirect it back to Amazon. It seems .buy will just be a redirect to some page on Amazon, or be something trademark owners must buy in order to protect. Remember .cc resulted in refunds from Clear Channel.

  2. ICANN sell to the highest bidder by CopaceticOpus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Wikipedia states:

    ICANN's primary principles of operation have been described as helping preserve the operational stability of the Internet; to promote competition; to achieve broad representation of the global Internet community; and to develop policies appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes.

    This auction is a blatant contradiction of these principles. An auction does promote a narrow sort of competition, technically, but anyone who didn't have millions of dollars to spare had no opportunity to participate. Now that Amazon has won, the competition is over, and the global Internet community can go broadly fuck themselves.

    We should expect much better from the non-profit organization in charge of the world's domain names.