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Amazon Loses Bid For .Amazon Domain

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46 pointsnilmonibasak73 comments

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Good? These new top level domains are ridiculous, imagine talking to some less tech savy person about one of these

"Hey, check out my amazon shop at coolstuff dot amazon"

"coolstuff dot amazon dot com?"

"No coolstuff dot amazon"

"huh?"

Com stands for commercial, amazon shouldn't need their own domain to sell stuff.

EDIT: commercial, not commerce

Back in the day, I co-founded a company that offered vanity e-mail addresses of the form firstname@lastname.some-tld. It eventually morphed into the .name registry. But what we did not realise, apart from misjudging demand, was how confused people get over this.

Even now, while I have my lastname.com that pre-dates that business by several years, I still have to spell out my e-mail address, often several times, to people who know my name. Trying to short-circuiting that process with "it's just my firstname at my lastname dot com" rarely works, and often ends up with them asking if is at gmail.com or something. So I dutifully spell it out, and many people noticeably don't make the connection between the domain name and my lastname even after they've written it down.

Familiarity is often far simpler.

I've found that "My firstname dot my lastname at gmail" works great over the phone. I don't even have to say dot com everyone understands "gmail."

It's a good email address, custom domains for email addresses are somewhat rare and often end up being more confusing than helpful. Unless it is support at domain dot com or info at domain dot com.

Not for personal addresses facing the general public though, I wouldn't think. Even something as simple as "My firstname at domain dot com" you'll end up spelling out the domain one time out of two whether you've been talking about it - or not.

There is an advantage to using firstname@lastname.com and that is if google decides to block your gmail account you aren't completely screwed. You can simply change the MX record for your domain, point it at a different service provider and continue getting the email sent to you.

True, but besides the point. The problem is users are conditioned to think that personal addresses don't exist beyond the big e-mail providers. "Not GMail or Yahoo? You, sir, are a liar, such e-mail address can not possibly exist!" (that is an exaggerated version of what I get with firstname@lastname.com: "so, firstname.lastname@gmail.com?" "no, firstname, at, lastname, dot, com." "so, firstname, dot, lastname, dot, com, at, gmail, dot, com?" ...)

If they start flagging mail from your domain as spam you'll have the opposite problem.

I have my personal email on a subdomain.org.uk address, and this has occasionally caused problems with people leaving off the '.uk'.

On the other hand, almost everyone I want to give my email address to over the phone will just use it for marketing, so I give them a gmail one and let the NSA index my spam.

"Come over to my house, the address is 2245 Azure Bluff."

"You mean 2245 Azure St."

"No 2245 Azure Bluff"

I don't see a different here. There's nothing special about .com. Plus, it's not going to scale anyways. Why not have arbitrary TLDs? There's no technical reason why this is an issue.

"There's no technical reason why this is an issue."

This is beside OP's point. This is a human problem; not a technical one.

There's a big difference there.

Your comment is written like you've never ventured outside of the tech industry.

More like "2245 Azure Bluff, or 2245 Azure Bluff Street?"

There's a road in Melbourne called "High Street Road" - as opposed to High Street.

If you allow arbitrary TLDs, you have to have some reasonable rules governing registration of secondary and maybe tertiary subdomains. Otherwise, the namespace will be saturated and the prices for new domains will be obscene.

How is this remotely more of a concern than .com saturation that already exists?

Uh, it's not--yet.

The state of .com today is the future of other TLDs in the future.

That problem will be made much worse much sooner if the owners of TLDs like .shop or .phone aren't required to allow second-level registration.

Agree, they're not a finite resource that should be miserly handed down every few years by ICANN. Register whateveryouwant.whoopdedoo for all it matters.

The difference is that most cities won't have both Azure Street and Azure Bluff, and if you address mail to 2245 Azure Street, it'll probably arrive at 2245 Azure Bluff.

Tell that to NYC. We have numbered streets. We have the same numbered street in a Street, Road, Drive, Terrace, and Avenue designation. Sometimes within a block of each other. Here in Queens, you can drive north along 23rd St and cross 23rd Terrace, 23rd Dr, 23rd Rd, and then 23rd Ave.

No idea about most cities, but my city (Veliky Novgorod, a relatively small town in Russia with mere 200K population and 90 km.sq. in size) has lots of such cases. Voskresenskii lane and Voskresenskii boulevard; Orlovsakya street, Orlovskii lane and Orvovskii passage and so on - all are distinct addresses, some located in very different parts of the city.

Out of 300 ways extracted from address database I see about 40 entries (counted by hand, too lazy to build a proper query) being very alike. Luckily, most names decline and "street" and, say, "boulevard" have different grammatical gender, so it's harder to make a mistake.

Round Greenwich way, we have Vanbrugh Park, Vanbrugh Park Road, and Vanbrugh Park Road West all within about 400yds.

Why yes, Mr Vanbrugh[1] did live in the castle on the corner...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vanbrugh

Falsehoods programmers believe about addressess: http://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-ab...

I said "most" intentionally; my point was that street addresses and street address matching are significantly fuzzier than domain names.

Try doing some geoprocessing once in a while: this is not an unusual quirk out IRL, and is one big PITA for delivery:

address says "Sokolska 20". Okay, let's guess from the other metadata that the city is actually "Prague" and not "Ostrava". No such house number at this address, perhaps should have been "sokolOVska 20, Prague"? Wonderful, that exists, solv- oh wait, do we have two different houses with the same house number? We do, multiple clicks apart, and both are legally correct.

In other words, that's a very good example you've used, exactly because it shows the underlying assumptions as faulty.

And then there's the concept of 'vanity addressing', though usually negated by postcodes/zipcodes - where affluent/"good" suburb is adjacent to a "less desirable" one - I'm not familiar with the geography, but for example where someone might say Beverley Hills, but give/live in Culver City's ZIP. Or in Melbourne, when I worked for a utility we'd get a lot of people who'd quote their address as Mont Albert, with a Box Hill South post code.

I've seen and experience variations on exactly that problems countless times in several different countries.

I'd like to have no tlds, except possibly .<isocountrycode> for governments. But that ship has already sailed and made side trips.

Do less tech savvy people primarily convey urls to one another verbally as opposed to sending a link? I mean I might have that conversation but, if I actually want them to checkout my site I am going to send them a link or at least write down the URL for them regardless of how simple it is.

I know if someone verbally tells me a URL I am not going to remember what it was, or even that I should go to it.

This is going to matter to so few people. Most people just type stuff into google anyway and browses are starting to hide the URL.

That's why so many people fall for phishing attacks.

"amazon.sketchysite.cn"? Seems legit!

"Oh, let me write down that web address so I can type it into the address bar in my browser later"

said no one ever.

It doesn't sound right, with this logic DNS would be useless. Even if I use search engine to reach most websites, the domain name remains an effective way to distinguish legitimate websites from illegitimate ones.

I mean that if I'm physically with someone talking with our mouths about a domain address and one wants to visit said address, 99.9999% of time the result is: "Cool, text/email/tweet/etc me that link".

That's the happy path.

Sometimes a site gets brought up in conversation, (hey, I found this site called HN with a bunch of neat tech information on it), and it's just not important enough to stop the flow of conversation right then and there. Later while you're looking in the fridge you realize, hey, that actually was sort of interesting. What was that site again? hn.com? hacker.news? What's this ycombinator thing, that can't be right.

Is that because so many domains have become obscure due to the huge .com demand? If there is now a plethora of easily-communicated TLDs around, that ought to result in more memorable URLs.

To illustrate that point, would you ask someone to send you the link if they had mentioned "shop.com"? What if it were "book.shop" or "teddybear.store"?

I think its because most people have a browser in their pocket at all times. Why would I write it down for you when I can just text you a clickable URL?

I have a smartphone within a few feet of me much more often than pen & paper.

I agree that they are ridiculous, but something needs to be done about domain speculation and .com dominance. It's becoming too hard to create a new business when pretty much every domain is taken. Consumers don't respect non-.Coms (even .net), and it's far too cheap and easy to register .coms and speculate on them unproductively.

It maybe just a matter of conditioning. We are so used to the old top level domains, but, maybe, we can quickly learn to be used to them as well.

Well, yes, some of it is that. But it's not just that. The programmers here should be familiar with the idea of namespace pollution. We only have one TLD space in the ICANN root and are discussing painting ourselves into a corner, tread lightly.

We certainly can. Once-unusual top-level domains like .io and .ly seem normal now.

To us, maybe, but not to the layman. I work with a theatre company, and we use Artful.ly for ticketing, etc. I have to explain to so many people that it's artful.ly, not artfully.com. At this point, we just tell people to go to our site and buy the tickets from there.

Never mind that .com itself (as a household term) is all of 15 years old. Not exactly a geological timescale.

> Not exactly a geological timescale

A. Humans don't live on a geological timescale

B. .com TLD's are in the formidable first ~15 years of socializing the web the mass public.

People adapt. They'll get used to it. I hope so at least. Paying top dollar for simple dot com names is something I don't like.

Totally agree. I was already annoyed at the fact companies are now allowed to apply in the first place.

.com is owned by a single company(and other top level domains owned by other companies), why shouldn't more companies own other top level domains?

Also, in regards to gp, saying .com is for all commercial companies is the equivalent of saying all commercial companies have to be in business with Verisign.

> .com is owned by a single company(and other top level domains owned by other companies), why shouldn't more companies own other top level domains?

I'd be for abolising .com (and other gtlds) too.

That seems like it could be a little messy... are you sure?

Also, if you think about what the world might be like 50 years from now, ".com" and ".org" might be remnants of the past we remember fondly. They will likely become less important on their own.

Since he specifically called out gtld's, I suspect he is a fan of cctld's.

The only real problem as far as I see it with cctlds is that it reinforces the notion that you must pick a country to be subservient to, but you aren't really escaping that by using gtlds..

Yes, I'm a fan on cctlds. Only exception I'd be willing to accept might be .int for organizations like UN that are truly outside any country. Like it or not, everyone else is subject to some country or another.

.com is owned by a single company(and other top level domains owned by other companies), why shouldn't more companies own other top level domains?

The fact single companies manage TLDs doesn't factor into my thought process on how we should manage the TLD namespace.

It sounds like your problem is really with Verisign et al., perhaps the fight you're looking for is how individual gTLDs are managed in the first place, not assuming that part of the model is fixed and exploding the namespace in some bizarro business fairness.

I would simply like to see more companies competing in the space of providing registration of domains for their top level domain than currently exist.

As far as I am concerned I see no reason not to have thousands or millions of top level domains.

I am a believer that with ample time and more options we will see the false assumption that everything is a .com become less widespread. (Although this belief is largely based on wishful thinking, I will admit)

.com is for commercial

commercial

Having worked in the domain industry, and closely with many of the individuals currently bidding on these new tld's (and in some cases have already won ./something/) I can say this is just a land grab. No one has any idea what to do with .nike, .coke or .whatever, they're just after them because they dont want someone else to get them.

I've been out of the "domain game" for a while, but aren't all of these TM-holders basically allowed to "claim" their names during the "Sunrise" period? That seems quite the opposite of a land grab: opening up early to avoid speculators snapping up copyrighted terms.

Unfortunatly the trademark rights are not extended to TLD's so this is a bit of an exception. That does apply to domains in general however.

sunrise doesn't apply to the actual gTLD, only with $something.TLD

so, I hold the trademark Firebox. I can use it to get Firebox.london or Firebox.ecommerce

but not .firebox

I worked a while back for a major company involved in the TLD rollout and was rather taken aback about how callous they were regarding what felt akin to extortion.

I've seen a lot of people have their morals shaped by the work they do. To me that's a lesson about being careful about the jobs I take. I got out of finance years ago, and now won't take advertising gigs, either. I don't want to be one of those people who ends up callous just because it's profitable.

Well, I changed departments in a company I was working for. It took less than 6 months to leave.

I would redirect amazon.com to shop.amazon, and then the other sites have more sense, like prime.amazon or local.amazon, etc etc.

The more I think about it, the more I think that non-country TLDs were a mistake. Each country getting their own TLD to manage as they see fit was a good idea... but everything else? It was pointless taxonomy. com/org/net/etc? Who gives a crap? At this point the TLD system is nothing but a way to drum up more registration fees by registering more and more domains per-business.

Of course, the fact that domains are backwards (subdomain first instead of last) is a bigger problem for obvious security reasons.

More domains per business, but also a sidestep around domain squatters locking up .com addresses - it seems like half the sites I see linked from HN are .io for presumably this reason.

I hope they give .amazon to those South American nations. They can then license the name to Amazon for a billion dollars a year.

The fact that these TLDs are being given to companies based on their size/lobby effort/money -- or even that TLDs are being given to anyone by any criteria -- should be sufficient to make all tech savvy people migrate to alternative DNS schemes, such as GNS or Namecoin. C'mon, this is not only ridiculous, it is hugely seriously dangerous.

> people migrate to alternative DNS schemes, such as GNS or Namecoin

"GNS" does not find anything relevant on first page of google results.

Namecoin would hardly be an improvement over current system, on the contrary a system where anyone can snatch any domain without any kind of mechanism for dispute seems like a step backwards. Especially when there is no top-level division of the namespace.

GNS is the GNU Name System: https://gnunet.org/gns

It is a kind of P2P petname system, but better.

I don't like Namecoin also, I was just saying that people should try alternatives, invent some, if Namecoin is not good for them. I like the GNS approach very much, but we should be thinking about implementation and/or alternatives.

GNU Name System seems interesting indeed. If I'm understanding it correctly you could mix'n'match centralized and decentralized stuff with it, eg you could delegate .com.gnu to VeriSign. But of course there is the little stumbling block that bootstrapping FoF/WoT style network is nearly impossible.

Actually I wonder if they could have used existing PGP key network as a basis for building their own system, eg do initial key exchange based on PGP keys.

Well, as I understand it, it is projected to work inside GNUnet, so, if they manage to get GNUnet, a highly challenging and multipurpose protocol (both to install yourself and much more to convince your friends to install) to be accepted by the public, the FoF network will be the easiest part.

I'm not into this existing PGP key network. What exactly do you mean by it? The key servers all around the world? Are there some apps/services that use this network for something? I always thought these servers were just sitting on piles of public keys and that nobody ever even looked at them.

This is pretty interesting. Where should I look at to get more information on this topic?

> much more to convince your friends to install

That is indeed the difficulty I referred to.

> I'm not into this existing PGP key network. What exactly do you mean by it? The key servers all around the world?

Keyservers are a small part of PGP WoT. The real magic is in the way keys are signed. I'm not going to try to explain how it works, there are many good writeups already on the net. You can start by reading the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust

The simplest way GNS could use PGP would be storing PGP public key => signed zkey mappings in the DHT, so that you could look up users zkey based on their PGP key. It is bit suboptimal because it still requires users to have separate keys, but I think it would be better than nothing.

Trillion $ changes hands on .COM domains, billions were lost on the .COM collapse, no other tld has this much $ spent on it. It is ingrained into people's consciousness. Who ever tells you otherwise is selling you a bridge.

Maybe they should apply for .amazoncom

Their main page could be www.amazoncom

oh, i got the bestest idea:

    .amazon·com

I can't imagine anyone being confused about that.

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