Amazon wins ‘.amazon’ domain name, aggravating South American region
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We are approaching a model akin to AOL keywords. Instead of a business directly controlling the namespace, we have a quasi-public institution that likely will continue to act at the behest of corporate interests.
For those who say the ship has sailed: I say this is only another chipping away at the democratic nature of the net. We must push back, or the beatings will continue.
Fully democratized decentralized naming simply lets the powerful squat on all the good names.
It's the tyranny of structurelessness.
That is a thing that happens, and it has a real effect. Those organisational charters inevitably reflect some underlying ethical system, and I think the role of those ethics in influencing organisations and their members is still under-appreciated in some contexts (I'm certainly not saying that free market economics or libertarianism - for example - don't have any ethical system, by the way - more the contrary). For example, over here, picking maybe the most visible examples, the NHS, Channel 4, and the BBC - and many of the people who work for them are heavily influenced by the ethical ideas behind them.
The current hierarchy is pretty weird. US GOVernment gets one, and US MILitary gets a separate one, and all US COMmercial entities get one, and most of the rest are non-specified ORGanizations, and the rest of the world gets to build under their 2-letter country codes. Except when company in San Francisco thinks it's cool to use one of those country codes to spell the end of a word, of course.
Ask any person to draw a diagram which includes all groups (and potential groups) in the world, and nobody will ever come up with what we've got now.
I don't see an obvious solution. It's a bad idea to let companies create their own top level domains (especially when it's taken from a region of indigenous peoples whose land is threatened!), but maintaining the old status quo doesn't seem like such a great idea, either.
Have there been any serious proposals to overhaul the structure of DNS names?
.com isn't US-specific.
Why? I would love to have an open DNS system not controlled by some registrars, and by a body which dictates that .paris is fine, but .hdjdhduh is not (except for a huge cost)
There's surely a lot of sucky things about the new arrangement where big companies can buy TLDs, but it's much more democratic for the rest of the 95% of humanity than when the US had de-facto control of the system. Just look at how many new TLDs are e.g. owned by Chinese companies.
It's a quirk of a home grown system having outgrown its original purpose.
I don't see how Brazil or Peru would use .amazon for public interests, unless it's targeted for international purposes (read: tourism).
But let's be honest, the "protection and awareness" is needed here on South America, where they are destroying it.
How many sites are they expecting to operate in order to justify a dedicated tld ?
It could be argued Amazon only "needs" one domain: Amazon.com (or com.amazon, heh). It could also be argued Amazon "needs" 1,000 domains (aws.amazon, books.amazon, electronics.amazon, prime.amazon, videos.amazon, etc). Who's to say who's "right" in these opinions?
Nobody really seems to care about what the most "right" domain is, anyway. Ignoring the mess that is .com/.org/.net, it's a daily occurrence to see .ai domains outside of Anguilla, .ly domains outside of Libya, etc.
There are several countries, multiple markets, and potentially countless government agencies or local companies operating in the area.
For example, Zhongguo, the country sometimes known as China, uses .cn instead of .zg.
And yeah, regarding tourism, most people traveling there from outside of Brazil will probably be searching for the English name. I can see why they'd prefer .amazon for that purpose, even if the uses are limited.
But then again, how many domains does Amazon (the company) really need?
When you see .hr, Croatia is probably the last thing you would think of. It's the first two letters of Croatia spelled in Croatian ("Hrvatska"). There are only so many ways to shorten a word to two characters, and .ca, .cr, and .co were all taken. I guess they could have went with .ct, but they've decided on .hr instead.
Similarly, .flights is always gonna be more useful to have control over compared to .vuelos (same, but in Spanish).
Is this different from l10n?
Sometimes written L9N by those who can’t count, or
who think that L10N that looks too much like “lion.”There was also a case where a country was removed from ISO 3166-1, resulting in ccTLD being removed (transitioned to other TLD). See .yu[1] which has been split into .rs and .me because of Yugoslavia breakup into Serbia and Montenegro.
Also for the region/biome it’s usually referred to as “The Amazon”
Thats rather close to being comedic. 5m in Amazon gift cards.
1. Corrupt states haven't gained control over an important TLD.
2. Corrupt states aren't getting gift cards that would be used for making the lives of corrupt officials better.
3. Corrupt states trying to surf in Amazon.com's success lost.
The corrupt governments can lose elections, but Bezos is a tyrant for life.
Good luck getting rid of your corrupt government, if you live in the middle of the forest.
Bezos is no tyrant. He is where he is because he satisfied people who willingly made his company a lot of money.
You can vote to put Bezos out of business by stopping to use his services.
Good luck voting once every four years to get rid of corrupt government officials. Good luck believing elections aren't arranged (especially if you live in the middle of the jungle in a highly violent place).
Let's stop drinking the Kool-Aid... shall we?
He already has more money than almost anyone else, it's not like he needs my scraps.
As the stock classes shenanigans show, it's easier to overthrow a government that to remove a rogue CEO with preferred voting stocks.
I had to cut it down as it wouldn't fit otherwise (26 too long).
Have you all forgotten what it was like before all these new TLDs became available? You couldn't find a decent domain due to squatters. This affected everyone from the layman to startups.
What is the entire region of the geographical Amazon going to do with a whole TLD? How is that going to possibly improve their situation? With this new TLD expansion, they have so many more options to work with now: Amazon.whatever.
If they really cared about TLDs so much, why not get .forest? .amazonia?
'Therefore we decide, that you don't need whole TLD. This company (whoa, with money!) will use it better'
But if you start to let people argue incessantly over who gets what ccTLD, the end result is that there just aren't going to be very many ccTLDs.
OC is saying "treat ccTLD's like we treated .com's: first come first serve" and you'll end up with a much richer variety of domains.
At the core of the debate is whether Amazon is a brand or a location. It's clearly both. Then the question is how to structure the shared governance of the TLD.
According to the Amazon.com proposal email [1], ACTO is objecting to the current proposal. Several ACTO member states have submitted proposals individually, but there is no joint proposal (according to the email from Amazon.com). I couldn't find any ACTO joint proposal - they only seem to agree on blocking or delaying Amazon.com's proposal [2][3][4]. ICANN has a responsibility to make a decision at some point.
Call me crazy, but I have very low confidence in ACTO's ability to run the TLD given that seven years into this process, we don't have a joint ACTO proposal
[1] https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/huseman...
[2] https://www.icann.org/resources/board-material/resolutions-2...
[3] https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/mendoza...
[4] https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/mena-to...
If you can't trust the TLD then just block *.amazon from your system services.
Seriously why don't the ISPs of the world just collude and reprogram all DNS servers to equate .x to .x.com or some arbitrary consencus-chosen TLD to spite these corporations' displays of power, and make it meaningless/impossible to own .x? People can then go to http://news.ycombinator/ if they wish, and then Y-Combinator can go ha-ha at Amazon for their shenanigans.
They don't, but why not get it if it's available?
I find these new TLDs to be abhorrent, but if they exist, why not own one if you can?
It could be a defensive thing.
I know from personal experience that carving out a clear online domain name is a lot harder with the expansion of tlds.
Also, I expect phishing sites will have an ever easier time registering convincing domains. So we're going to end up relying on browser blacklisting... not exactly an improvement for security.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Federation_of_Li...
I wonder if there's some research on this. I'd assume that most of the internet population have their smartphones/app ecosystems for getting to Amazon or even looking up hypothetical Brazilian tourist info through Google.
I understand why both sides want the TLD but I'm not sure what significant usefulness it has other than property rights regarding domain names and the future of how these cases will be settled.
It would be funny, if not poetic justice, if Brazil decided to do just that following this decision. Likely Amazon would sue them and an arbitration court would side with Amazon though.
Amazon would have to be pretty dumb (and petty) to do that after this kerfuffle.
So, no it's not the exclusive property of Brazil.
For most people though I don't think it makes a difference, as I don't think DNS hierarchy is well understood by most internet users.
In my mind: .(root server) > (global feature/country/company) > (feature/host) e.g.
. > .br > amazon
makes more sense than
. > amazon > ccTLD.
I think a better example for your point would be `.ocean` as the logical way to divided it would be pacific.ocean, atlantic.ocean, etc. however no one entity "owns" the whole or said parts of the ocean and dolphins do not want to administer DNS servers. That said, naming things is hard.
I don't think that was the claim, it was just an example
It's fine to be an entrepreneur and own a small business that takes part in the local community, but that has nothing to do with the business you're in. Selling regular household merchandise is not a good business anymore.
If they were always going to be just a piece of the market, they would have had to show profits for that, what, 15 years that they didn't have to? This put brick and mortar stores at an extreme disadvantage.
Amazon just executed better. Competition is good for consumers who have clearly stated they prefer the prices and availability of online shopping. Small neighborhood stores no longer served the market.
So saying there's nothing intrinsically good about "mom-n-pop" stores compared to what Amazon is is a very dubious thing to say. To re-iterate, sure, consumers chose Amazon for a reason, but things are not black-and-white and deciding if something is good or bad is far more nuanced than just that.
I'm not sure where this rustic idea of "mom-n-pop" general stores comes from because there are still millions of thriving small businesses well integrated in their local communities. The key is that they don't sell the same basic goods that Amazon sells.
IMO it is critical to split the company and take away these public properties from them.
I guess the second argument is that the arrogance displayed in saying things like "no, there shouldn't be any commons on the internet" (which is what closing such a generic tld does) is evidence that they have grown beyond what is healthy for society.
But that reminds me of the SMBC comic from 2012 (when SOPA was being discussed), about how India invented the number zero and so by ad absurdum of 'IP belongs to content creators', "owns" half of all digital data. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-08-29
As for whether they make those the new generic addresses... I'm not sure. I think they are more likely to use the new tld for internal dns and keep their existing public names.
200,000 acres of Amazonian rainforest are burned every day circa 2019, but hey: next day delivery, frappucinos, netflix, and my comfort zone...
concrete metaphor. I have zero evidence on Amazon's business practices being directly related to deforestation.
having said that, Bezos, as the worlds richest man, is in a huge position to do something about the environmental catastrophe we are bringing upon ourselves, and so far he's appearing preoccupied with gaining the US military machine as his biggest client.
He appears to have put literally no effort into changing businesses practices in the slightest, with regards to packaging, delivery means, etc
And should we wait for him to do something? I think we shouldn't.
If any organization represents the destruction of Amazon's river basin ecosystem, those organizations are exclusively the state institutions of the 9 countries that cover that area. They are the sole responsible entities that decide which activities are and are not allowed, and how to enforce their rules to punish those who break them.
Note that they have one Mexican, one El Salvadorean, but no South Americans. Also note that the only African is a Tunisian ex-Google employee. And the only east or south-east Asian appears to be Japanese. Why are we letting this group of business people make decisions about global internet? Why not, for example, scientists from the different countries?
Whether you like it or not, those "global businesses" do have an internet presence that's unquestionably more extensive than some countries. It would not be fair if organizations or countries that clearly are not interested in having a say on any issue regarding the global internet would have more of a say in these issues than those whose livelihood is the internet.
FWIW, it's said that .int (international) never gained momentum for these globe-spanning organisations.
this is a good time as any to remind that the vast majority of the world is under illiberal regimes and religious dictatorships and a "global internet governance" would outnumber free, liberal countries 2 to 1.
you'd need to start putting barriers and borders to the committee to avoid regime using it to steer the internet toward oppressive goals, and there's not one way of partitioning it that would make the whole thing politically acceptable by the countries making the cut and by those not making it. it'll become just another bargaining chip on the international political bickering, at which point competing business interest under a liberal constitution start to seem a more reasonable compromise.
Further, ignoring the global nature of the internet when it comes to the governance of it seems simply unwise, and is very clearly a political decision in itself and not neutral.
It is also clearly illiberal to explicitly deny agency to a multitude of affected stakeholders that have been allowed to join the network, despite their dirty track record.
Below are the first 4 I looked at:
Prior to his position with ICANN, Marby was the Director General at the Swedish Post & Telecom Agency in Stockholm, Sweden.
Career business person: https://icannwiki.org/Cherine_Chalaby
Leon Sanchez is ... is a lawyer and head of the Intellectual Property Division for Fulton & Fulton, a law firm in Mexico.
Previously, Burr served as the Deputy General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer at Neustar from May 2012 - March 2019.
Clearly, .amazon was intended to refer to the geographical region, given that no other corporations have their name as a top-level domain.
and then to:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/surface
Money well spent there?
Half of the HTTP "Too many redirects, gave up" errors I've ever seen in my whole life were from microsoft.com
These days I have less reason to visit microsoft.com, but I recommend looking for (and retaining when you find them) URLs in the form https://aka.ms/ which seems to be curated by somebody who actually respects the idea of URLs and so end up pointing to wherever the content is now, even years after it has become a Wiki of a Blog Post about a KB article with a Word document in it.
I'm assuming it's manually maintained, since I can't imagine any possible automatic system would keep up with the nonsense at microsoft.com, but so far it has worked.
At least, unless Chrome decides to add even more logic for these corporate gTLDs...
It's extremely easy for humans to make mistakes and have cognitive distortions from information collected over time. Your comment is completely uncalled for.
Some of the new TLDs created are actually useful, Russia got a TLD for the IDN value that native Russians would recognise more easily than .ru -- .рф and it's been pretty successful for locals.
Some of them were land grab attempts, people see .com makes a lot of money and imagine that some of that could be theirs, but alas mostly they're wrong. .horse, .aero, .london and so on. Their only value to the wider community is that they allow jokes like http://my.lovely.horse/ or http://ibless.therains.downin.africa/
A few of them are straight up vanity, but whereas your vanity domain might be costing you $25 pa from an expensive vendor with a crappy web site thrown in, operators of TLDs are spending many orders of magnitude more to obey rules
.kerrylogistics .kerryproperties and .kerryhotels all exist for example, and obviously those are completely useless, anybody looking for those outfits will either Google or knows their much shorter "real" domain name - but I guess probably they get a bulk deal on some of the technology needed, maybe the whole lot costs them only $2M per year to maintain.