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Brazil and Peru Dispute .Amazon TLD 163

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the bad-idea-has-bad-consequences dept.
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.'"
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Brazil and Peru Dispute .Amazon TLD More

Brazil and Peru Dispute .Amazon TLD

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  • Bezos can register amaz.on and am.azon

  • Mega Corporation Money Grab in 3 - 2 - 1. Just in time for the holiday sales rush! I bet this whole thing will jusr go away for X-amount of dollars.

    • Re:Stand-By! (Score:5, Funny)

      by msauve ( 701917 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2012 @01:21PM (#42057969)
      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."

      The countries in the Amazon River basin have a no more legitimate claim to the domain than does the company. Let them use .amazonriver, if they wish.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        By that logic, amazon.com should use .amazoncompany, if they wish.

    • Oh, how I pity those big ass mega corps getting burned over their short sightedness by lifting a used term, Amazon, Apple, Sun.., how unoriginal, how non-authentic, how false, you can't even have a Wikipedia page without some serious elbowing and constant clashes, oh poor ones, cry us an amazon.

  • Should have used location-based domains (Score:4, Insightful)

    by concealment ( 2447304 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2012 @12:52PM (#42057555) Homepage Journal

    Back in the day, there was some concern over the fact that domain names are universal. Someone wanting Amazon in the US for example has different rights than someone wanting Amazon in Brazil. Many people suggested that we go to location-based domains.

    Amazon has mostly followed this model. You order from Amazon.de if you're in Switzerland, or Amazon.co.uk if you like toast with your Earl Grey.

    Maybe this approach should be re-revisited for domain names in general. Is it fair that one person gets amazon.com, even though there is a region, at least one bookstore [salon.com], and a tribe of warrior women vying for the name?

    • Back in the day, there was some concern over the fact that domain names are universal. Someone wanting Amazon in the US for example has different rights than someone wanting Amazon in Brazil. Many people suggested that we go to location-based domains.

      Not location-based, but country-based... if we had it to do over again, ccTLD's would be the way to go. That clearly "silos" trademark disputes and numerous other legal issues to each country's respective governing laws. You might make an exception for the root DNS servers and other ICANN-designated entities, but the principal would be the same: the TLD identifies the legal authority for the underlying names.

      • And prohibiting people from using other countries' domains unless you do business or have some formal relationship to the location? I can live with that. I'm tired of seeing Columbia, Tonga, Cocos Islands, and Greenland capitalizing on their TLD. It's a bit silly.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AK Marc ( 707885 )
          Tuvalu is the worst.

        • I'm not tired of it .. I use it as a way to know which ones to avoid. Anybody using any of those TLDs becomes a site I won't visit since I just assume they're shady.

          And all of those things like bit.ly? Well, since I can't tell what the fscking URL is, I'm not following it.

          • Anybody using any of those TLDs becomes a site I won't visit since I just assume they're shady.

            You mean like Goo.gl (Google)? T.co (Twitter)?

            • You mean like Goo.gl (Google)? T.co (Twitter)?

              Are those actually real? I've never seen them, and I wouldn't follow a link like that -- I would assume it's bogus. Since I have no idea where .gl is, I wouldn't click on that link.

              If I want google, I will go to google.com, permutations of that will be assumed to be fraudulent, pointless, or wrong.

              Nor would I click on bun.gl, fon.dl, stup.id, wank.er or any of these ones which try to be overly clever with a TLD from somewhere else.

    • The .com domain was created by the US Department of Defense, and has been under US control ever since. The US registrar chose to make it a generic domain allowing international registrants early on, and that turned out to be a good decision, because a lot of foreign and multinational companies chose to register under it. But openness to foreign registrants shouldn't give other nations legal claims on the TLD. The .com domain is still a US-owned and administered domain.

      If you want a location based domain,

    • Maybe this approach should be re-revisited for domain names in general. Is it fair that one person gets amazon.com, even though there is a region, at least one bookstore, and a tribe of warrior women vying for the name?

      The region got its name after a Spanish explorer sailed up the Amazon river and got his ass kicked by a tribe whom he mistakenly thought were all women.
      The Spaniard went back home and told his story to the Holy Roman Emporer, who then decreed the river be called "Amazonas".

      Greek mythology > Amazon River > bookstore in Minnesota > Amazon.com
      Since Greek mythology can't really call dibs, I'd give this one to Brazil and Peru.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EdIII ( 1114411 )

      If there was a tribe of warrior women, I'm thinking they would have taken the domain already.

    • Why not:

      amazon.bookstore
      amazon.warrior-women
      amazon.river
      ...
      apple.computer
      apple.grocerystore
      apple.musiclabel

  • TLD's make no sense unless your a mega-corp.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by richardoz ( 529837 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2012 @01:01PM (#42057679) Homepage
    It's just another way to further entrench branding to the point that the Internet will be "owned" (in a marketing way) by 4 or 5 companies.

    • They don't even make sense if you are a mega-corp. Seriously, who cares if it's "kindle.amazon.com" or just "kindle.amazon"? The latter looks gimped anyways.

  • The other half will, of course, be Amazon, Inc. objecting to any South American entity using .amazon for any purpose but to drive traffic to Amazon, Inc.

    ----

    Personally, I think the whole TLD thing would've gone a lot better if no new .TLDs were created save those assigned as country-codes, codes for multinational entities like the UN or the European Union, or domains needed for purely technical purposes like .ARPA.

    Alas, money and politics rule the day.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AK Marc ( 707885 )
      With regional DNS, it would still be viable for Brazil to run .amazon internally and redirect all internal .amazon traffic there, and not honor .amazon as applied by the international .amazon. If push comes to shove, I can see something like that happening, and then DNS will fragment and we'll have to go back to typing in IP addresses about the time we finally move to IPv6. Have fun with that.

      • no. breaking DNS and making people switch to IPv6 would be a pain in the ass. what we should do is use moving to IPv6 as an exuse to go to contry code based tdl's. then split the country codes up into subdomains of com mill gov org net edu or their lingual equvilents for for non english speaking countries. and let people keep using the currents sytem but only on IPv4.

  • Mathematicians (Score:3)

    by hemo_jr ( 1122113 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2012 @01:11PM (#42057825)

    In related news, big number mathematicians are considering whether to dispute the .google TLD. Many consider the corporation to be moving in on their turf and want to reserve the domain for the public and insomniac sheep counters.

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by srussia ( 884021 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2012 @01:13PM (#42057861)
    Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline have expressed no interest whatsoever in the .microsoft TLD.

  • First, Amazon owning ".amazon" is a stupid idea. Really, guys: that's just dumb. Stop it.

    Second, were Brazil and Peru even remotely interested in ".amazon" before Amazon tried to create it, or is that a convenient excuse to coerce Amazon to ask their blessing (presumably for a modest compensatory donation)? I don't recall hearing of their grand plans for that TLD before today.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      To be fair, if such a TLD existed and access of it was loosely given out, it would serve as a worrying vector for phishing and other scams.

      I agree I would be rather curious to hear the sequence of events that lead to this dispute.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Eevee ( 535658 )

      Does that matter if they currently have plans or not? Now is the time to fight to establish possession, because if the company gets hold of .amazon, it will be next to impossible to get it back.

  • Ok, this is from a link in the original article.. but this bit REALLY jumped out at me.

    ICANN has seen over $350 million come in as a result of the process, but said that covered the cost of dealing with the whole process.

    I am really curious, what kind of 'process' they are using that eats nearly a quarter of a billion dollars just to decide on some new gTLDs. It isn't technological in nature.....
  • I actually support that, we should have more awareness of the amazon. Amazon the company can just use Am or Zon or something.

  • . Even though I do enjoy a couple of my .xxx domains creating 100's of domains is useless and will alienate users. Who the hell would want to use or type in yourfoodstore.amazon?

  • This is exactly what was predicted (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2012 @01:45PM (#42058309) Homepage

    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 [slashdot.org]

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hpa ( 7948 )
      Indeed, and the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization can be amazon.int (which is what the .int domain is for, although for some bizarre reason the biggest treaty organization of them all, the United Nations, is at un.org rather than un.int. Not to mention that having its own ISO 3166-1 code and a number of suborganizations a .un top-level domain would actually make sense.)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pla ( 258480 )
        although for some bizarre reason the biggest treaty organization of them all, the United Nations, is at un.org rather than un.int

        Offhand, I'd guess they did that for the same reason that everyone registers the ".com" version of their name, if available - Because, given a domain name, people will completely forget the TLD and try, in order, com, then org, then net, then just ask Google for the damned thing.

        Hell, I've used the internet since that meant using Mosaic, and worked in IT for over 15 years, an

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dkf ( 304284 )

          Hell, I've used the internet since that meant using Mosaic, and worked in IT for over 15 years, and I have not ever gone to a ".int" domain knowingly (though I've probably hit one or two through Google searches and didn't notice).

          I'm in a similar position to you, except I have knowingly been to .int addresses. It's amazing what having dealings with the EU bureaucracy can lead you into! (Well, not really. "Boring. Terribly, terribly boring" is far closer to the truth.)

        • The only one I have seen and used belongs to ICAO [wikipedia.org]. Specifically aircraft type lookup [nyud.net] (CORAL cached: the site is flakey enough already)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by xaxa ( 988988 )

          I think the most likely .int you've used (probably linked to from Slashdot) is esa.int, the European Space Agency. (In Europe, we sometimes pronounce that "ay-sa").

          http://www.esa.int/ [esa.int]

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • which is what the .int domain is for, although for some bizarre reason the biggest treaty organization of them all, the United Nations, is at un.org rather than un.int.

        The UN actually has both un.int and un.org; on the web, un.org is used for the public-facing website, and un.int is used for the "Member States portal". I suspect they may have been using .org before .int was setup in 1988 (which was spurred by NATO getting .nato -- before that I think they were using .mil even though they weren't US milit

    • I do not find your link trollish. Just a mild "i told you so"

  • Oh, Bezos. Just a few years before you formed your company, did not Intel show that you should make up a new word, rather than use a number, or as anyone would assume was clearly implied, use an existing word?

    And it's the name of a place? I can cut you some slack on that; nobody ever knows for sure that they'll ever hit the big time and become a world power. Nevertheless, you made it. Good for you, but there are consequences.

    Now you must face a difficult decision: are you going to rename your company

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Radak ( 126696 )

      Oh, Bezos. Just a few years before you formed your company, did not Intel show that you should make up a new word, rather than use a number, or as anyone would assume was clearly implied, use an existing word?

      Actually, he did make up a new word. The company was originally going to be called Cadabra.com. How many shares of AMZN do you want to bet the company would have fared much poorer with that name?

      And it's the name of a place?

      My understanding is that he went with the name Amazon because the Amazon river moves the largest amount of water of any river in the world and he wanted to give people the impression that his company would do the same with the printed words.

      Say what you wish about the TLD debate, but Bezos clearly picked an apropo

  • Read the truth about ICANN and the DNS (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21, 2012 @01:58PM (#42058475)

    The rotten and corrupt Domain Name System [kimmoa.se].

  • The other Amazon country, with land borders with Brazil and Surinam?

  • If they want to protect the Amazon rainforest, I think they should do something about the illegal lumberjacks, the aggressive cattle pastures and crop farms first. Respecting the natives, stopping wildlife smuggling and foreign companies from patenting natural chemicals found in the Amazon is also a good thing. I don't think the environment cares about 6 bytes at the end of a domain name.

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