South American nations open fire on ICANN for 'illegal' sale of .amazon | Hacker News Reader

South American nations open fire on ICANN for 'illegal' sale of .amazon

theregister.co.uk

281 pointstejado184 comments

We badly need a good replacement - ICANN has recently been making it abundantly clear how poor a choice it is to rely on an opaque, unaccountable centralized entity for something as crucial as DNS.

Whether or not you agree with their decision, this whole saga fails to inspire confidence in their processes and long-term neutrality.

A particularly concerning quote:

"Those PICs were published months later but ICANN went out of its way to make sure they weren’t noticed: it published them on a sub-site that requires people to register to access information, instead of using its normal public comment process, and it made no public announcement about the publication, despite promising to do so."

Reminds me of the passage from the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about the demolition notice:

"But the plans were on display..."

"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."

"That's the display department."

"With a torch."

"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."

"So had the stairs."

"But look, you found the notice, didn't you?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard."

ICANN is a captured organization and hasn't been acting in the best interest of the general public for ages. It needs to be reformed or replaced. The fact 'staff' make decisions and the board skirts any responsibility is a travesty. Their model of governance is a failure, they don't actually listen to people or build consensus. They operate in the shadows and even when it gets noticed, they ignore the public backlash.

What about [ENS](https://docs.ens.domains/)?

https://handshake.org/ ?

I personally blame ICANN more than the corporations here.

No individual entity -- person, place or corporation -- needs a TLD. They're TLDs, they're for giant collections of people, places and things.

But once ICANN says, "Hey, would you like to buy <.YOURCOMPANY>? It'd be a shame if someone else did.", most any company is going to say, "Goddammit, fine", and then once you've spent the money on it, you might as well start using it, with store.YOURCOMPANY and about.YOURCOMPANY and mail.YOURCOMPANY, and now the conventions of hierarchical domains and the very notion of URLs is meaningless.

I do blame all of us webdevs for getting cutesy with with making the TLD part of your company/domain name.

ICANN selling corporate TLDs is something akin to the Library of Congress trying to sell Subject Headings. Not content with spamming everything else on the Internet, some people now want to spam root name servers.

There are some compelling use cases for .brand TLDs, especially when a given brand is a large company that has lots of different websites. Take Barclays for example. They're a bank, so they're obviously especially sensitive to security issues, and they run a bunch of different websites. Just using websites of the form barclaysfoo.co.uk is obviously unsafe, because it's rife with phishing opportunities since you're training customers to accept these kinds of domains and then some phisher goes out and registers barclaysblah.co.uk and users don't think twice about entering their credentials there.

Subdomains off barclays.co.uk are also not great, because cookies can be shared up to the domain level (intentionally or accidentally), and you don't want any risk of your potentially less secure marketing websites being compromised through CRSF or something and leaking access to sensitive login cookies on the actual bank's website.

So the best solution here really is to get and use the .barclays TLD. That way, there's no possible cookie/session-sharing security exploits since every website is truly a different domain, and only Barclays itself can register .barclays domains so customers can have trust when they see a .barclays domain that it is actually the bank they're dealing with. Additionally, there's fun security things you can do at the TLD level, like globally applying HSTS preloading, that Barclays isn't doing (but should be) and that we are.

And as for open TLDs, the existing generic namespaces like .com are heavily mined out and it's very expensive to acquire a decent domain name in them. So having all these other alternatives available now makes it much easier to get a decent domain for a reasonable cost, which is good for users (and bad for domainers, who I have no sympathy for). For example, I managed to pick up cyde.dev at the base registration cost, which I'll be putting some real content on at some point in the future. I think that's a pretty darn good, short, domain-specific domain name, and much better than anything I could've gotten on .com. cyde.com, by contrast, was registered way back in 2002, 4 years before I ended up going with my second choice of cydeweys.com. But I like cyde.dev better, so I'll be migrating stuff over to it.

Full disclosure, I run .dev (but not .barclays!).

> There are some compelling use cases ..

It's interesting how you count organizational complexity, incompetence and (minor) technological shortcomings as a reason to create a whole new TLD.

It's convenient for the brand, but not a good reason to pollute the global namespace, especially as it sets the expectation that every organization worth something should have one.

> the existing generic namespaces like .com are heavily mined out

True, and the proper solution is to clear some up. The name authorities need some shaking up. Squatting should be made illegal/against terms and actually prosecuted/applied. Registering domains by 100s or even 100'000s you should not get discounts - you should get unaffordable price hikes. On ccTLDs maybe people could get a few free domains and then have to pay for everything extra?

> but not a good reason to pollute the global namespace

What does that even mean though? In what way is the global namespace being "polluted"? Adding more TLDs doesn't affect the existing ones. It's not adding scale problems that DNS can't handle. This seems to be a subjective concern; some people don't like that there are more valid TLDs now than there used to be. That's not pollution though.

> Squatting should be made illegal/against terms and actually prosecuted/applied.

Be very careful about asking for increased enforcement. It's a great way for the authorities to abuse their newfound power. Most people involved in this field do not remotely want more of this.

Also, domains are gonna have to cost $100s/year to fund all of this increased enforcement. How do you even define squatting? How do you prosecute it? This isn't remotely workable.

> Registering domains by 100s or even 100'000s you should not get discounts - you should get unaffordable price hikes.

How? TLD registries typically no longer even know the identity of the registrants. This would leave enforcement up to the registrars. How does a registrar solve the problem of people using multiple accounts to register domains? How do you solve the global problem that there are thousands of accredited registrars, and that people could register domains through many different ones? Without massive centralization, this is not a remotely workable solution, and massive centralization would be a "cure" much worse than the disease.

> On ccTLDs maybe people could get a few free domains

Free, or even low cost, domains are guaranteed to lead to abuse. Also, how do you individually allocate free domains to people?

> In what way is the global namespace being "polluted"?

There was a time you could name your hosts server1.dev and server1.prod. These days, what am I supposed to use for internal server communication, lest it some day resolve to something on the internet or a trusted CA creates a valid certificate for it?

Domain names were organized in a relatively stable hierarchy, with a set of registries. The way TLD registrations are going, all organizations will want their TLD and we will end up with a single centralized tree of unnumerable registries.

You use to know what were the locally relevant domains. Now, is it <company>.co.ccTLD, <company>.ccTLD, or is it <company>.dev, or <company>.<company> or is it <company>.uno, ..gmbh, ..kaufen, ..kinder, or maybe <company>.wazoo, because why not? You get a link to or email from <your-ISP>.talk - is it legit, or a fake in a spamhaus registrar?

If you have a .bank, a .cafe, maybe a .shop, but you also do .trade, and .trading, and of course everyone wants to be .top ... of the hundreds of TLDs, are you supposed to register all that could apply and pay large sums for it, because people are going to type <company>.<whatever-i-think-it-is>?

If we create dozens(?) of new TLDs per year, noone will remember the difference between TLDs run by nigerian scammers and those run by respectable businesses.

There never has been such a time. It has always been a mistake to use a fake domain name, even just on internal networks. This has caused problems as far back as the 90s, e.g. when companies merged and suddenly realized they had conflicting fake domain names upon connecting their networks and now lots of stuff started failing. For more information see: https://jdebp.eu/FGA/dns-use-domain-names-that-you-own.html

So the only time it has ever been safe to name your hosts server1.dev is within the past year, now that .dev is actually live and you can use a real globally unique domain name that you actually own, thus preventing any of the possible issues that have been there all along.

And there aren't any TLDs run by Nigerian scammers. You may be underestimating the difficulty, cost, and technical know how of acquiring and running a TLD.

I'm sure ICANN would love to claim ownership of the entire name hierarchy, but I disagree. At least on my servers.

First problem with your suggestion - you don't own domains, you rent them. That can change, you have to pay, someone can forget to renew, etc. Though I agree, sometimes it is better to use proper registered domains.

When setting up limited scale server-to-server communication I really do not want to interact with DNS. It's all downside and no upside. Servers get names in a subdomain of a widely squatted invalid TLD, names with locally appropriate IPs go in a hosts file and I can be reasonably sure they get resolved to the proper IPs, or as a failure mode - none at all. With the occasional network layer security, it is important to get the IPs right.

If the need should arise, I can change the domain. I don't see how using a proper DNS name would be better instead of a clearly local one I can trust.

> TLD registries typically no longer even know the identity of the registrants.

Maybe they should know? Why do they pester me every year about my contact details? I think they also say my registration can be voided if I use fake info.

If you need a bunch of LLCs to register thousands of domains, your expenses go way up.

Not all registries need to work the same way. It should be sufficient if some applicable ones are rinsed.

> How do you even define squatting? How do you prosecute it?

Registering domains for the purpose of selling at a higher price.

If you look at the top domain holders, I'm sure it would not be that difficult to prove in court what the purpose of all those domain registrations are.

Civil proceedings would probably be better, at least for smaller squatters. If you squat lots of domains, you get a chance of someone hyperactive suing you, or making complaints to the registrar.

The reason is GDPR, plus whois privacy/proxy services.

How do you possibly know which domains were registered with that intent? That seems like it'd require mind reading. And who would be doing the enforcement? National governments? Good luck with that. Squatters would just operate out of the countries that don't care.

I own roughly a dozen domain names. Most aren't in use. I didn't register these with the intent of reselling them, but if someone contacted me offering me a thousand bucks for almost any of them I'd take that deal. I suspect most other people would too. Does that make us all squatters? Should we be arrested and prosecuted?

> Free, or even low cost, domains are guaranteed to lead to abuse. Also, how do you individually allocate free domains to people?

You go to a government site with your electronic national ID (some countries have those) and request 2-3 domains that are free. You only get to change a free domain 1x per year or maybe longer.

Doesn't apply to all countries, but how would that be worse than what we have now? Everyone could have email and websites on their own domains, probably even hosted for free - that's decentralization/freedom.

So you'd have to go wait in line for hours at the DMV to get your domain names? That sounds strictly worse than what we have now, and would be way more expensive for governments to administer (as ccTLDs would now be a cost center rather than a profit center).

We don't have DMVs here, we are required to have national eID cards, which we can use to log in to government sites to do tax returns and stuff. It's government, so it would cost a lot, but it shouldn't be too much to implement limited per-person domain registration. In USA it would be harder.

Administrative costs - additional domains can and should cost more. You can collect fees from companies that don't want to be reliant on that one guy, or just call it a day, give a domain for free to companies and call it administrative expenses. How much does it cost to run a ccTLD?

> Just using websites of the form barclaysfoo.co.uk is obviously unsafe, because it's rife with phishing opportunities since you're training customers to accept these kinds of domains and then some phisher goes out and registers barclaysblah.co.uk and users don't think twice about entering their credentials there.

This is a case for a better structured web, not for giving up meaningful hierarchies altogether. It shouldn't be possible to register a .co.uk domain unless you are a company that is registered in the UK and can be sued. Ideally companies also shouldn't be allowed to use TLD not designated for them so barclays.awesome etc. is suspicious. A namespace like .bank.uk would be even more secure.

> Subdomains off barclays.co.uk are also not great, because cookies can be shared up to the domain level (intentionally or accidentally),

There is no reason we can't treat barclays.co.uk like a top level domain for some purposes, using a mechanism like the public suffix list.

> But I like cyde.dev better, so I'll be migrating stuff over to it.

So the new TLDs encourage people to migrate, thus changing URLs and frequently breaking them by not bothering with redirects.

> It shouldn't be possible to register a .co.uk domain unless you are a company that is registered in the UK

That's literally what .ltd.uk is for, and no-one cares about it

There are lots of these TLDs with restrictive registration policies based on who you are and they tend not to do very well because they're too much hassle and they suffer from a chicken and egg problem; not many people use them so there's little added benefit since the average user isn't aware that they're more restrictive, and then since it doesn't really matter to users potential new registrants don't bother with the increased hassle and cost.

The problem here is that the hassle-free alternatives exist and are open to entities for which another namespace has been designated in the first place.

I'm not following this argument, because the kind of reorganization you're asking for here is impossible, whereas simply creating new TLDs is relatively easily and has thus actually occurred. There are how many millions of already-existing .co.uk sites that aren't companies registered in the UK, so how is your suggestion even possible? This horse has long left the barn.

Creating .bank.uk is not impossible. Nor is cleaning up .co.uk -- it would be painful, of course, but sometimes you have to rip off the band-aid.

You are proposing linkrot on an unimaginable scale. You're talking about breaking the Web, on purpose. It will never happen, and for damn good reasons. This horse left the barn several decades ago.

Links rot all the time. The web is already broken.

Your proposal would break it an order of magnitude more, easily.

Also keep in mind that domain names are treated as property in most jurisdictions. You cannot take away someone's foobar.co.uk domain just because you want to retroactively change policies. It's not even possible from a legal standpoint.

> Your proposal would break it an order of magnitude more, easily.

Considering that the vast majority of links die within a few years, that isn't even possible.

> Also keep in mind that domain names are treated as property in most jurisdictions.

That's a policy that can easily be changed.

I'd agree with this except that they are not selling those TLDs for 10 bucks or 12 bucks - if they like the dictionary word for it or its short enough the .dev tld will charge you 720 dollars per year flat even though there's no pressure on the demand of a million different tlds.

Just checked google for a word earlier this morning that was free and balked at how stupid this TLD land grab is, unless you own or manage one.

If that domain didn't cost that much it's not like you'd be able to buy it for $12 now anyway. Instead, some domainer would've bought it milliseconds after launch, along with thousands of other speculative domains, and you'd be looking at a parking page right now with a listed sale price of 4-5 figures. Domainers play a VC-style game; one sale needs to cover the cost of lots of losers, and there are lots of big players out there with deep pockets and specific needs, so prices are high.

Economically speaking, an auction is the best way to fairly and efficiently allocate scarce resources.

It's not scarce though, its completely artificial scarcity.

Just because an auction means that people cant buy up every domain doesnt help anyone at the end of the system - it just ensures that domain name registrars capture the "value" instead of the scammers, the end user still gets a shitty deal.

So yeah, its stupid, and the system has only been fixed enough to keep getting itself paid.

It's very real scarcity. We're talking about a single unified globally unique namespace, that must serve billions of potential registrants. There are only so many short strings and common dictionary words available, and way more people want them than can get them. So a domain like e.g. clothing.com, or clothing.{some other popular TLD} is absolutely a very scarce economic good in a real sense. It's more scarce than almost anything else I can think of; most products are fungible and more can be manufactured to meet increased demand, but you can't sell multiple copies of the same domain name. A good domain name is like an original artwork by a known artist, in scarcity and in price.

No, way more spammers want them than can get them - most people dont own a domain name hence the word "potential".

Clothing.com is definitely something several people/businesses want, certainly, and having an actual auction for a good multiple users want isn't nefarious, its the "as the domain registrar to prevent middle men from capturing the value I will automatically do it instead" that is.

If you want to make it less so, offer some service to stop ripping off individuals who want to buy one domain - is there possibly of abuse there? sure? but whose making all the money here?

There's no one bidding (except in an abstract sense of wanting to own it all) on the domains I am talking about - they are free to register at any time as long as you can pony up the cash.

So who you propose runs the auction then, and who keeps the proceeds?

As for everything else you're proposing, I'm not sure I understand how it'd work. How do you "stop ripping off individuals who want to buy one domain"? If .web launches tomorrow and a thousand people want clothing.web, how do you allocate it without holding an auction? If you do a lottery, how do you know that each entrant is a bona fide person and not a ticket box stuffer? I'm not seeing workable solutions being proposed here.

On the domains you were talking about, there was an auction when the TLD launched, and those names just weren't taken during said auction. Plenty of others were.

> It's very real scarcity.

The main issue is not the really scarce ones. As you've said:

> some domainer would've bought it milliseconds after launch, along with thousands of other speculative domains..

This is misallocation, which is an entirely different issue, and a more pressing one. And yes, I would put those guys to jail, as long as it was done fairly - their squatting may be worse than stealing.

Stupid? Why is it 'stupid'? Because to you it's of no interest or need or the cost is more than you would like to spend? So therefore it's 'stupid'?

Because this is pure rent-seeking.

Sounds to me as if the best solution would be a well run .bank tld.

So, what, barclaysfoo.bank, barclaysbar.bank, etc.? It's still clunky, and is still training users to accept an even more insecure naming pattern (because now they need to look for the barclays prefix and the .bank TLD; if either of those is off, it could be an attacker's site). Plus, is Barclays supposed to secure some assurance from the TLD operator that the prefix "barclays" is theirs alone, and that no other such domains will be created for other entities? That sure sounds like a namespace of its own at this point, except without the syntax making that obvious.

Never mind that Barclays provides more services than just banking, so a lot of their existing websites aren't suitable for .bank, and now you're gonna have their Web presence scattered to the winds across various TLDs.

> No individual entity -- person, place or corporation -- needs a TLD.

The 'nobody needs' standard? That is what and how we think of things? Does anyone 'need' beer or football or 100,000 other things?

In a market system if you have money and if you have made money you can use that money to do things and buy things. It's not up to someone else (you, me or comments on HN) to determine that what we want to buy that we can legitimately buy is 'needed' or not.

Football is of ZERO interest or need to me. But I do recognize that others get pleasure from watching it.

> They're TLDs, they're for giant collections of people, places and things.

According to who exactly?

According to RFC 920:

"The domain system is a tree-structured global name space that has a few top level domains… While the initial domain name "ARPA" arises from the history of the development of this system and environment, in the future most of the top level names will be very general categories like "government", "education", or "commercial". The motivation is to provide an organization name that is free of undesirable semantics."

https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc920.txt

From 1984 that is 36 years ago. And it's a RFC not the constitution or a law.

After much discussion ICANN and parties decided to allow companies to own tld's. And they did.

> In a market system

The DNS is an obvious natural monopoly.

> “No individual entity -- person, place or corporation -- needs a TLD. They're TLDs, they're for giant collections of people, places and things.”

I would say it's either no one or everyone — I personally wouldn't mind if we could all get a tld and link that to a personal public IPv6 range and simple enough software to administer it. I think we should all be entitled to get that over internet, it belongs to all of us as a system.

Why do you people have such a weird emotional attachment to your concept of what TLDs should be? Like, who cares? and why? It's not like anyone is actually going to use these gTLDs anyway.

ICANNs rent seeking scheme sucks, but beyond the rent seeking this is hardly a big deal.

I've seen the shitshow that speculative domain squatting .com had been about twenty years ago and I sure don't want to relive that experience on the root namespace. Particularly since ICANN has repeatedly shown that they would be terrible custodians of an "everyone" namespace.

Of course, if the company would have been called something like "Niagara Falls", or "Yosemite", or "Grand Canyon" and the US government protested, we know the result would have been very different. Just another example of how unjust and unequal in general the administration of domain names is.

Right, the US Government would have paid a lot of money to buy the TLD, like they did when they signed a contract that assigned all of the trademarks for Yosemite, including "Yosemite National Park", to Aramark, and then wanted the trademark back.

Wow, I hadn't heard of this. Link for the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yosemite_National_Park_tradema...

Ah, thanks for the link. Let me correct the record: Delaware North held the trademarks, Aramark was the new concessionaire that had to rename the Ahwanee Hotel, etc.

I'm not an expert on Niagara Falls, but isn't it equally Canadian?

It is. So this is probably not the best example by the parent (given that there would be yet another party trying to claim it).

But I think the point they raised is still very good.

I thought they were being sarcastic, so I'm not sure it's clear what point they raised. Also, people seem to think the US government does not act in a similar way.

I think they were suggesting that if the US objected to new TLD it would be a different process/outcome than when the South American countries objected.

Well, the process of imagining things that support your prejudices is very broadly applicable. You'd think people would just get bored and jaded with it.

I have no idea what you're going on about. Who has prejudices? Me? The grandparent poster? What specifically are you in disagreement with?

Regardless, I think you might be reading way too much into things.

If the US government wanted to protest, they’d probably do so in a far less incompetent manner.

>ACTO insisted on a face-to-face meeting and Marby duly got on a plane to Brasilia. He was in his hotel room in Brazil’s capital when he was told the meeting had been cancelled due to the political situation in Venezuela.

In the end the ACTO folks didn’t even care enough to meet with the ICANN CEO who had traveled all the way to Brasilia to meet them.

I can’t buy the Venezuela excuse, surely the ACTO gtld experts are not the same people who deal with Venezuela.

> I can’t buy the Venezuela excuse, surely the ACTO gtld experts are not the same people who deal with Venezuela.

It was the foreign minister of Brazil who canceled the meeting, citing the tensions with Venezuela as the reason for cancelation. [0]

[0] https://veja.abril.com.br/blog/radar/chanceler-cancela-reuni...

So uh, the problem was that they didn’t want to participate in the negotiations because Venezuela is also a party in the ACTO?

This seems to solidly prove that they never gave a shit about the gTLD.

Waiting for the ICANN CEO to fly over there before announcing this was just a fundamentally shitty move, it’s not like the tensions with Venezuela were a brand new thing. These people are clearly just assholes.

> This seems to solidly prove that they never gave a shit about the gTLD.

That doesn't make any sense. ACTO disputed .amazon's proposal as soon as it was made available, in 2012. It's been 7 years, circumstances and governments have changed. At the time there were no tensions with Venezuela, in 2019 there were tensions. How does that prove anything about the gTLD?

> How does that prove anything about the gTLD?

It’s a shitty, childish excuse for the refusal to participate in the process. Internal disputes within the ACTO were enough for them to drop the whole thing, if they cared they could’ve proceeded despite the fact that Venezuela is a member of the ACTO.

Send in an underling then.

The problem wasn’t that the FM was busy with more important stuff, it was that Brazil didn’t want to participate in negotiations where Venezuela was a party.

But they also couldn’t be bothered to inform the other participants about this fact until it was way too late...

Tensions don't change if you send the 2nd or 3rd in command instead of the foreign minister.

You do realize it's serious issue in the region when the world's superpower that is known with coups in the region is threatening you your neighbor with force? For people living there, including the politicians, it's not just another news. Sounds more than reasonable excuse to cancel the meeting.

No, I don’t see how this is at all relevant to the gTLD issue.

And yeah, what SpicyLemonZest said.

This is very much “just another news” to the people living there. You’ve got your dates all mixed up. By Feb 2019 this was not even news https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/04/trump-sugges...

Finally, the stated reason for cancellation was that the Brazilian FM did not want to sit in the same table with the Venezuelans. Not any interesting new developments regarding Venezuela.

Respectfully, you’re projecting your own view of the situation onto Brazil. Violent conflict isn’t an unknown thing in the region and Brazil is solidly on the anti-Maduro side.

> "Niagara Falls", or "Yosemite", or "Grand Canyon" and the US government protested

Not even close to being true. I have actually dealt with the US Government and have gotten explicit permission from them for something very similar. Official letter from the appropriate agency 'not restricted by anything feel free to use'.

> Just another example of how unjust and unequal in general the administration of domain names is.

Typical internet furor over what you read that others say who are not properly informed about a topic.

Nothing 'unjust' the process took years and years not exactly a back room deal.

It seems from the article that they just wanted to extract money out of Amazon. Moreover, they never gave a single reason on why they didn’t want Amazon to have the domain.

This is what the ACTO requested [0]:

- a joint steering committee (ACTO and Amazon) for .amazon, giving ACTO countries the right to veto domains;

- delegation of second-level domains to ACTO countries;

- commitment from Amazon not to register domains that have significance to the region.

I haven't seen any news that suggest they were trying to extract money out of Amazon. It was Amazon that was flaunting money at ACTO.

[0] https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/zaluar-..., http://www.itamaraty.gov.br/pt-BR/notas-a-imprensa/20312-sol...

I vaguely remember something along the lines of using "Amazon isn't spelled Amazon in any of the countries in South America" as an argument.

A pretty stupid argument if you ask me.

It's not even technically correct: Guyana's official language is English. (Though it just barely includes any of the Amazon basin.)

You can find the agreement here:

https://www.icann.org/resources/agreement/amazon-2019-12-19-...

I would like to actually see the discussions leading to this agreement.

The ideal version of ICANN is to be the "UN of the Internet", but its recent actions make it sustainable that there are too many commercial motives involved.

Ideal version of ICANN would replace nearly everyone there and turn it into a utility that is regulated. Put up TLDs for competitive bid every 10 years with binding commitments that last the entire time, no guaranteed renewal of contract for legacy TLDs.

new gTLDs are out of the bag. I'd say they need some regulation, the thousand percent price increases isn't fair to consumers, but it's hard to put that cat back in the bag and get rid of them. Might need a neglected pool where registry operators simply bid to handle them, you know registration volume and price. They don't get any crazy fees to operate the neglected pool.

They can still get an “.amazonas” tld.

It’s not like Spain has a .es and a .sp or the US has a .us and the .eu tld.

If Amazon the company didn’t exist or it was called “the warehouse” these countries would give a rat’s ass about the .amazon gtld.

Who are "they"? Southamerican != Spanish speaking. There are English speaking and Portuguese speaking countries there.

IIRC, there's only one English speaking South American country, and the Amazon doesn't run through it. You could argue that 'some people in some countries' speak English, which is true, but the same is also true that a large amount of folks in the US speak Spanish, yet we don't try to claim .EU.

The Amazon is not just the river and the basin it is also,most importantly, the rainforest which belongs to 8 countries (9 if you count France). You have Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, and French plus several creole languages there. Guess whose language is the best one for a common denomination?

That's an interesting point. I'm not saying you're wrong, just posing the following for thought: If a country/language picks a name for a place, that that place doesn't use, who owns it so to speak? That is, who 'owns' the word Germany? And by own I mean, makes some claim to it. It's hard for me as American perhaps because the 'lingua franca' is my native language. For example, I feel no sense of ownership of the words 'Estados Unitos', or Meiguo(sp?), and see them as belonging to other countries. Food for thought...

Portuguese? Spanish?

"Amazon" is "Amazonas" in both Spanish and Portuguese. Guayana is the only majority English speaking country I can find in South America, and it's hundreds of miles from the Amazon river at its closest point.

In Portuguese it's way more common to refer to the region as "Amazônia" (the rainforest) than "Amazonas" (the river). "Amazonas" hardly represents the Brazilian side.

Regardless, English is the lingua franca of the Internet and that's the reason why geographical terms in English matter.

Well, Amazonas is also the name of the largest Brazilian state by area and one of the largest subdivisions in the world.

It is not "Guayana" it is Guyana. And the Amazon rainforest covers part of Guyana and Suriname too for that matter. And even France. So you have at least 5 European languages plus several creoles.

No, that would be deemed too similar.

I am sheepishly conflicted.

On the one hand, I get that domains and TLDs are important aspects of branding, people care about making sure terms are tied to the most salient endpoints.

On the other hand... isn't this whole system a bit like some guy in a basement writing a list of words next to various numbers? Then we all just decided to tell our machines to listen to that guy?

It feels weird to me to be angry at the phone book I chose to use.

And if all popular indexing methods are subject to public debate, we end up in strange places.

We might single out ICANN as special, more important, but given how many people go through search to land on websites, rather than typing domains directly, in some ways ICANN is just pushing one index in a crowded field. In some ways Google is more ICANN than ICANN. Google's top level results for amazon (and java and cheddar etc.) aren't places.

If we don't really like how some guy maps symbols to symbols, maybe we should just make your own map that we do like better? If it is better, promote it, maybe it catches on. Namecoin and Tor basically do this, though they're limited to certain use cases. Some alternate DNS resolvers block/re-map known malicious sites. ICANN isn't forcing us to care about any of its decisions.

I don't know, I have enormous uncertainty here, and "hey just abandon a core feature of the internet" is definitely too glib given how unsure I am about all this.

But still, it's just an arbitrarily filled map. It feels really weird to me to be angry at a random lookup table. Maybe just walk away from it instead.

EDIT: larkeith's top level comment also ends up at ICANN replacement, with far more sympathy and less bewilderment along the way, I respect that a lot.

EDIT 2: Brevity. Still failed but trying.

"It feels really weird to me to be angry at a random lookup table"

Most of the time it seems like the things people are angry about, politically, involve who gets to be the gatekeeper for things. That seems to me more or less equivalent to who gets to own and maintain certain lookup tables.

Having control of something like that isn't about the physical book or something you have, it's about the relationships you have with all the people "who matter" that use your lookup table.

>maybe we should just make your own map that we do like better?

I wonder how many of recent efforts on DNS alternatives was motivated by the perspective to profit off of new names gold rush. Some even got VC funding IIRC.

Isn't the internet designed in such a way that if a consortium of eight countries doesn't like icann, they're free to start their own DNS authority and point their servers to that?

Forking DNS is the nuclear option. It could easily make establishment of new TLD impossible in practice.

Why is that a nuclear option? There's plenty of nonstandard uses of DNS already. Iirc wasn't there something where the IETF intent for .local was trashed by apple?

This is a tabloid drama story for nerds.. a domain dispute over a hypothetical website jointly owned by multiple countries? That website doesn't even exist and probably was never on the radar until the domain came up.

It is appealing to view the web like physical land and seeing this as a border dispute but it only goes so far. If the (non-existent, hypothetical) website is discoverable on search engines and the URL is published by the government's it works just as well

'Amazon' is an _English_ translation of a _Greek_ name given to an _Eurasian_ tribe. What claim do _South American_ nations have for it?

I loathe to defend Amazon and ICANN of all the fucking things, but come on now. There are plenty of reasons to shit on these two, but not this nonsense. 'Illegal', lmao.

The etymology of a word is a silly reason to deny assigning ownership of a TLD. How the word originated is far less important than how it's used. The case Brazil et al are making is that the global common understanding of "Amazon" is more theirs than Bezos'.

In this case though it seems like the most common use for a .amazon domain would be to scam Amazon customers. Tourism could easily go under a .com. That'd be a good reason to assign it to Amazon. It'd be in the interests of people regardless of the company.

Even given your second point, I would argue with the first, given that I think that globally, the company is more thought of when someone sees the word "Amazon" in 2020 than the rainforest.

That's not even the important point. Ownership of a domain name doesn't have to do with who is more of the owner of the name, nor whether the name is "etymologically pure", or whose use of the name is more popular. The entire right to own a domain (or TLD) is based solely upon ICANN's Uniform Dispute Resolution Process, and any established case law which exists in your particular jurisdiction. So this thing that the majority of the world's communication and commerce is dependent upon is adjudicated by a private entity in a single country that makes its own rules.

That’s exactly the situation the South American countries what to fight against.

So it's not AMZN that wants to own the word, it's South American countries that want to do so, even though they have no more right to it than the company.

They had the word first. That is a compelling argument.

Imagine I start a company today called "America" (I'm in the UK). My business is wildly successful and grows to the point of being a global unicorn that can afford gTLDs. Should ICANN allow me to own .america? A lot of people would argue I shouldn't..

They did not have the word first. Amazon was first used to describe warrior-women from Scythia.

Of course they do simply by virtue of being sovereign countries rather than some corporation.

"the amazon": thought of the rainforest/river (only)

"amazon": thought of as either the rainforest/river or the company.

I really dunno what does the world population think of that though (no one knows really).

> the amazon

I think of tall female warriors

If tall female legendary Greek warriors show up and make a claim to the .amazon TLD, we should consider their claim. So far they haven't.

The river was named due to a European associating it with the mythical warriors.

Go on?

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

"The name 'Amazon' is said to arise from a battle Francisco de Orellana fought with a tribe of Tapuyas. The women of the tribe fought alongside the men, as was the custom among the tribe. Orellana derived the name Amazonas from the mythical Amazons of Asia described by Herodotus (see The Histories [4.110-116]) and Diodorus in Greek legends"

I was (vaguely) aware of that but what difference does it make here?

The point is that the word "amazon" (which is what is being bought as a gTLD) was not first used in South America, so they have no claim to it beyond "we use it too". Which isn't a good claim, otherwise they should've/would've been able to prevent Jeff Bezos from calling the company Amazon in the first place.

No, they used it first and Bezos named his company after the river. He could have chosen another name instead of using one that was already taken. He's the one that caused a name collision so he's the one that should suffer from it.

Who is "they"? It seems like it was used first by a conquistador. Who wasn't Greek.

That's "The amazons", in plural.

In English, "the Amazon" could also be a valid phrase apart from the river. For instance, you might have a course called "The Amazon in Ancient Greek and Modern Culture".

No, it would still be "The Amazons from Ancient Greece" or "The Greek Amazons" or something. "Amazon" singular in that context is only used as an adjective, such as "the Amazon Queen".

Quick edit: Ah wait, I think I see what you're doing with that phrase. It's shorthand for "The Amazon culture" or "Amazon depictions" or something, but it still comes off as strange-sounding to me.

Using "the X" to generalize about a group of people is likely to trigger offense if you're talking about a group of people who exist or is identified with today. It's not just the essence of stereotyping, but also kind of affected and pompous.

So, sure, it sounds "strange", but it's not new, and people use it when they want to make a generalization with a tone of authority. Probably one might expect to get away with it when talking about an abstract concept or archetype that exists independently of actual people.

Well it could refer to a specific one.

Is it wrong to think of the mythical warriors?

Also, maybe someone should make a modest proposal to Bezos to rename the company "Orellana".

I don't understand this argument at all. Do none of the Americas have any right to have trademarks on words, since none of the languages spoken here are native to the Americas?

Can we not trademark English words, since we aren't English?

The point is "Amazon" is just a word used by South Americans to name things in their culture, in the same way that Bezos names his company "Amazon".

The fact that they sold the TLD to the the company is a little sketchy, but the idea that South America has an inherent trademark on anything "Amazon" is ridiculous.

So it should be a common name, like "water" or "air" and that domain should not be on private hands. But if I had to choose between a beautiful river and its surrounding rainforest and a company which forces some of its contractors to pee in bottles I know who I will choose.

> common name, like "water" or "air" and that domain should not be on private hands

This seems like an entirely separate argument.

Domains like .earth and .country are privately owned, nobody cares. http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

Well given the fact that Guyana is an English speaking country and a member of ACTO, it has as much right as US has over a hypothetical New York or California domain. Or it does not count because it is "South-American" and not proper English to you?

I think the choice of New York/California really muddies up this comparison. Maybe a Guyanese company named Rocky Mountain getting ".rockymountain" would be more apt. Otherwise you start to bring in comparison to geographic boundaries over many countries vs political boundaries which have historically been reserved in DNS as well as protection of existing domains when registering a new one which (I don't believe) is the case here as well as government vs other domains and possibly more "as well"s I'm not thinking of.

Why does it muddies it up?

For the reasons I listed in my comment.

Baja California is in what country?

Also, most of the outrage I'm aware of over the commercial use of California by non-Americans is because some people name things "California" and then don't sell them in the US.

https://www.adventure-journal.com/2019/08/its-absurd-the-new...

English is the de facto lingua franca on the internet. English is also the official language of both Guyana and the Falklands. I think that would give these nations a case for a claim.

Guyana yes, Malvinas not. First, they are not a nation, they are a (disputed) British overseas territory (by own choice) and second, they are nowhere close to the Amazon.

The company is named after the river, not the Eurasian tribe.

IMO South American countries should just ban the corporate-owned .amazon from local DNS. The least they can do is boycott the domain.

I really don’t want governments blocking my internet to fight their petty disputes.

I wouldn't care if .amazon was unreachable by local DNS, because I bet Amazon will give every significant service an equivalent amazon.com domain. They might add "aws.amazon" but I doubt they're taking away "aws.amazon.com".

Balkanization would send an important message to ICANN.

Then how else should they enforce a law assigning the .amazon domain to its rightful owners? Not that anything would be blocked in the first place unless Jeff Bezos were stupid enough to actually use the domain for anything important.

> rightful owners

So Amazon.com, Inc then? The only party who applied for the .amazon gTLD.

Nope, ICANN's policies don't determine that.

What does then?

That depends on the jurisdiction.

Sounds like Brazil was the one being unreasonable here. It looks like a shakedown of Amazon. Lest you think of Amazon as a big, powerful, org compared with Brazil, remember that the Brazilian government's budget for 2020 is over $900 billion dollars.

A monetary compensation was never requested, only shared rights to the TLD. AMZN was the one trying to throw materials at the issue to make it go away.

It is not just Brazil, it is ACTO, there are 8 countries from South America there.

The world is running at full speed towards a dystopia where private companies are more powerful than entire countries.

Which appears to have been one of the main aims of WTO and most international trade deals over the last 30 or so years.

What if these countries pass laws to require ISPs to rewrite the SOA for the .amazon domain and point it to an alternate root controlled by the ACTO?

Morocco banned Google Maps after they displayed a border with Western Sahara. Now if one requests a Google map of Morocco from within .ma, they get a version without the border.

Like the Dutch East India company?

> Like the Dutch East India company?

No, not like that. The East India Company had independent military power. ICANN does not.

This is stupid. These countries have no right to this TLD just because the forest of that name is located there. If they had wanted it they should have applied for it first. It is equally as stupid as saying that Jeff Bezos can't use the name "Amazon" because it is owned by the owners of the Amazon rainforest, or saying that Brazil can't name its rainforest "Amazon" because that is a Greek mythological term and, therefore, owned by Greece. Nobody owns the word "Amazon"

> Nobody owns the word "Amazon"

Good luck calling your next venture Amazon then.

What this shows is that Amazon now effectively owns the word Amazon, stripping countries where the largest river in the world flows, of the rightful use of the term.

> What this shows is that Amazon now effectively owns the word Amazon, stripping countries where the largest river in the world flows, of the rightful use of the term.

It absolutely does not. Nobody is going to stop calling the Amazon Rainforest or the Amazon River the Amazon. Nobody is going to prevent the countries who have the Amazon within their borders from promoting the Amazon abroad. The only thing that changes is, well, nothing. Because the countries involved clearly had no intention to apply for the .amazon gTLD until AMZN did. So they lose nothing.

It's a bit disturbing that all major search engines show results for the company Apple before the fruit apple. Not even talking about ads. A search for "apple" comes up with a tech company, not the food. Seems a bit perverse especially for searches performed by those too young to have known a time when apple the fruit had a stronger association with the name than Apple the corporation.

Why should a search engine decide which of these is more important rather than what the user is more likely searching form?

I believe search engines are in the business of showing what people want to see, not making decisions for us. (Insert remarks about google here)

99% of the time when I search "apple", I do, in fact, want searches related to the company. Now that I think about it, I've never searched for apple (as in the fruit) casually.

If it makes you feel any better, [apples] is still predominantly about the fruit.

(I mean, ads still show the computer, but I'm assuming no one is doing brand-building ads online for the fruit.)

This is a major problem with search today. It's not however a problem with the size or power of Apple. It can just as well happen with some random thing that nobody is politically concerned with.

In general, when I search for something that could be ambiguous (and everything is) I want a sample of each possible cluster or meaning. But today, Google (and others follow their lead) is determined to give you the answer, and also certain that nobody reads beyond the first few hits. It's not helpful to say "give right results and not wrong ones" because a fanatical devotion to that "idea" is what got us into a dysfunctional situation.

It's really silly for you to be offended by something as objective as the PageRank algorithm, which is essentially how search results are ranked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Wouldn't need good luck. Do a search for "Amazon" here and you will see why not:

https://icis.corp.delaware.gov/Ecorp/EntitySearch/NameSearch...

I'm not sure why you think global naming rights issue forth from the second smallest state in the United States of America.

The point of the GP is that there are many companies called "Amazon" or some variation thereof, registered in Delaware alone. Clearly AMZN does not own the word "Amazon".

I'm sure Amazon the company protects its trademark well.

I'm also guessing those countries don't speak English and "Amazon" is localized as something else.

> This is stupid. These countries have no right to this TLD just because the forest of that name is located there.

But it's not stupid that individuals who've thrived economically beyond reason can now own almost anything and we keep making excuses to allow them to?

Greek here, you can expect our lawsuit papers shortly.

If the Greek started suing everyone over words and won, Greece would be a very wealthy nation, moneywise.

Or we would speak as our forefathers have, of stuffkenning and farbkenning and amberkenning. Unclefts and flytrains, not the other words in our wordheap.

We prefer to release our words under a CC-BY license.

> Nobody owns

There's the problem. The name exists, so somebody owns it.

Who has more right to it? The countries with a big river with that name running through it, or the ecommerce startup from really not that long ago?

That is a ridiculous statement. My first name is Travis. I am not the owner of https://travis.io/ but somehow we coexist. That's because even though the name clearly exists, no one owns it. But this guy owns the domain because he registered it first. By your logic this would come down to who the oldest person with the name is. It sounds stupid in this context because it is. There is no principal here, just a money grab by some South American countries who had no interest in the domain until someone rich registered it. If it was a matter of principal they would have objected when Bezos registered amazon.com, but he wasn't a billionaire then, so they didn't care.

Well, you don't own .travis though. Nobody complains that Amazon owns amazon.com

Fair point, but a general objection to privately owned TLD's is not what is being argued in this case.

No, but it is being argued that it’s different/more significant than a standard domain.

Why would Amazonian nations care about Amazon.com? It’s a company called amazon on a commercial TLD. They aren’t even commercial entities.

As a TLD it offers a much more broad use.

This is increasingly less tru as TLD's like .amazon are being given out. There's no reason that a or b in format a.b is more important, other than the fact that the arbitrary convention exists that a can be anything but b can only be one of a few choices.

.amazon is also a commercial TLD if AMZN buys it.

It's a top level domain, not one in the .com namespace.

A top level domain used for commercial purposes is in fact a commercial TLD. It's not the commercial TLD, but it is "a commercial TLD".

Apparently, the answer is the highest bidder.

Wouldn’t it also be the only bidder in this case? Nobody else ever made an application for the .amazon gtld.

Yay... let's put a price tag on everything! Let "the market" decide. What could we also sell... let's see: Air, water, children... the highest (richest?) bidder decides.

Especially if he got rich by exploiting workers (through low wages and bad working conditions, like wearing diapers) and exploiting state regulations (through tax evasion).

We do sell air and water, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Where do we sell air?

Access to clean, drinkable water is a human right, btw.

If no one owns it then scrap the trademarks worldwide before the decision. Companies have insane amount of power over words.

well their claim is better than that of a company

The root problem isn't who should operate individual gTLDs (ICANN always owns it) it's that gTLDs aren't restricted in ways that make it so people aren't worried about who is operating it. In an ideal DNS ACTO would be ecstatic someone else is footing the bill for the gTLD and it's operation not worried about what that means for their right to use it.

So Brazil attempted to block the establishment of .amazon because of Snowden revelations that the CIA had wiretapped the president of Brazil's phone?

That seems to suggest, if that causality is correct, that if Amazon weren't an American company, Brazil wouldn't have had any objection. So it's just a naked attempt to use a private company headquartered in a nation another nation is mad at for political horse trading and ICANN made the right decision.

They should be renamed ICAN'T.

They already have that nickname.

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