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Comment by vitorgrs | Hacker News Reader

I'm Brazilian, and I'm not sure .amazon would be useful for us. Here, we don't call Amazon rainforest, well, amazon. We call "Amazônia" and in Spanish "Amazonia".

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.

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A lot of country top levels aren't based on the local language's name, but the English one.

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?

Zhongguo also has .中国 and .中國 as top-level domains which would presumably be more intelligible to Chinese speakers.

That is true, but non-ascii TLDs are also relatively recent.

I didn't realize there even were non-ascii TLDs. I thought non-ascii domain name components were restricted to everything but the TLD.

Domain names are ascii; there's just an encoding for unicode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode

Right, but those weren't originally allowed for TLDs. It looks like internationalized ccTLDs were finally approved in 2009.

Doing the opposite is quite inconvenient indeed.

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).

Inconvenient... for English speakers. But more convenient for locals. Seriously l9n is still an important aspect of software.

> l9n is still an important aspect of software.

Is this different from l10n?

Apparently using l9n instead of l10n is common enough to deserve a footnote in https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/java-cookbook/059600170...

  Sometimes written L9N by those who can’t count, or 
  who think that L10N that looks too much like “lion.”

Ha, interesting thanks. I was wondering how someone could've independently come across the concept of counting it out without coming across the correct term itself, but I guess if it's a commonly-made mistake, that explains it.

ccTLDs are based on ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 codes, except some older ccTLDs before this was standardized (e.g. .uk instead of .gb) and a special case (.eu). It is also governed by a different entity/policies than gTLD (ccNSO instead of GNSO)

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.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.yu

I remember seeing the split in Yugoslavia mail come though when I worked for BT on the international side on interconnects - a rather sobering email to read.

The People's Republic of China (Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó) and Republic of China (Zhōnghuá Mínguó) are the official names for the two contemporary sovereign states currently claiming sovereignty over the traditional area of China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_China

That's because that's their ISO country code, they didn't specifically pick it for the domain.

The top level domains were chosen based on the wishes of the countries' governments, at the time the system was created. For example South African .za is based on Afrikaans which isn't even the most common language spoken there. The reason is because the SA government still practiced apartheid back then.

They wanted the tld for tourism.

> They wanted the tld for tourism.

How many sites are they expecting to operate in order to justify a dedicated tld ?

How many sites does Amazon need?

Presumably even if they don't intend to use the tld for lots of sites (perhaps stores could have subdomains) they'll be using the tld as a way of proving authenticity. Only they can create links with .amazon so they can assure customers of their safety from phishing etc.

This isn't really a good-faith argument (for Amazon or SA) because of the reliance of opinions inherent in the word "need".

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.

The real argument here to me is actually for AWS purposes... in which case i can see millions.

Probably more than Amazon.

There are several countries, multiple markets, and potentially countless government agencies or local companies operating in the area.

It’s about money. The TLD is worth a lot. While I think .amzn would be more appropriate there is also a significant phishing risk for .amazon to be open to the public. Not everyone uses a password manager.

I suppose it will become an issue when Amazon likely tries to block any effort to register .amazonia

If they did that, then yes, I think the countries would have a proper grievance against the company.

Yep. Only reason they’re looking for an English TLD is because they expect more tourists from English speaking areas than from the local regional populations, otherwise they’d prefer .amazônias/.

Also for the region/biome it’s usually referred to as “The Amazon”

No, it's because the internet is in English. How is it possible someone on hacker news does not understand this?

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