It's interesting that they want .amazon specifically for tourism/commerical purposes, because it's the English spelling, which is not used locally.
Because if it were for locals, it would be .amazonia and .amazonas. (Similarly to how Germany is .de, not .gr or something like that.)
And not that tourism means they don't deserve the name... but it's not like this has anything to do with indigenous rights or a business trampling a people.
It's just a globally-known tourism business vs. a globally-known shopping business.
So not exactly something I can find myself caring about much. What do ICANN's rules already say? Does it go to whoever first registers, or whoever pays the most?
> It's just a globally-known tourism business vs. a globally-known shopping business.
Actually it’s a globally-known shopping business named after the afore mentioned globally known tourism business. Which I think is an important point.
If call your software company Barcelona, then you sort of need to accept that you aren’t on an equal footing when it comes to name ownership with the place you named your company after no matter how big you get.
Brands are always in a flux. Amazon the river and the forests and the people have a stronger brand now than the mythical Gods. But Amazon the company has not overtaken all the above.
Would be an interesting poll, broken down by region, but speaking for myself if you say 'Amazon' to me without context, I'll immediately think of the company.
Similarly 'twitter' in older literature throws me off for a second. I'd bet it's plummetted in usage in recent years.
It's just about familiarity - I use some part of Amazon the company almost every day, but have no ties to _the_ Amazon, nor see it as frequently in news items.
How about if you think of it in terms of the bond that such branding rests on. Surely, if my tribe, home, and history is tied to the name Amazon, then that beats (for some definition of "beats") one's relationship with an online retail place?
I am not arguing for any side, but I do acknowledge that the Amazonian community's right to the name rests on a very good argument.
>Surely, if my tribe, home, and history is tied to the name Amazon, then that beats (for some definition of "beats") one's relationship with an online retail place?
Which goes back to crazygringo's point:
>Because if it were for locals, it would be .amazonia and .amazonas. (Similarly to how Germany is .de, not .gr or something like that.)
> I am not arguing for any side, but I do acknowledge that the Amazonian community's right to the name rests on a very good argument.
I'm also not arguing for any side, but I don't think your "bond" argument is particularly convincing. Namely, it strikes me as too vague in the general case and thus too hard to adjucate. The things you use to nail it down (tribe, home, history) are specific to this case, but don't generalize well. Even if you were able to address those problems, it doesn't compell me to think that these people deserve the English name for the geography in question (perhaps especially if those people don't really identify with the geography in question, but rather as nations who happen to live in that geography?).
In any case, it's a puzzling and interesting question.
Oh, I absolutely don't mean to comment on who 'deserves' (for some definition that includes 'is allowed to pay for the privilege of') it - that's a judgement I'm glad not to have to make - I was responding purely to the point about 'brand' strength.
Again, it's familiarity, and that's just me personally. I do like apples, but other than using a Mac for work I don't have any Apple gear. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that someone else first pictured iPhones etc.
> But Amazon the company has not overtaken all the above.
That might be true, but I don't think it's a foregone conclusion. I think it's entirely possible that depending on how you measure it, Amazon the company has overtaken all the above.
Edit: And to be slightly less waffling, I think it's entirely possible it's overtaken them in some of the most obvious ways to measure, such as (global) public consciousness and word association.
I wonder how things will look in 50 years? Amazon (the company) may look unstoppable at the moment, but huge companies do come and go; in a generation or two, perhaps they'll still be dominating the scene, or perhaps they'll be a forgotten also-ran.
I'm pretty sure the Amazon (river/basin) will still be there, and will still be one of the earth's great geographical features; I hope even the Amazon rainforest will still be noteworthy on a world scale.
In 50 years, the Amazon river/basin could have been geographically swallowed by a new political entity and renamed. Sure, that's much less likely than Amazon the company being defunct (I hope, that seems more likely to be harbinger of world disrupting changes), but I think it's also more likely than Greek mythological scholors deciding to change millennia old characters and concepts.
I'm sure we can choose a specific metric to make the Amazon geographic area win, just as we can for any of the others in this comparison, but picking the metric to match the outcome we want doesn't seem the right way to go either.
I can definitely see cases for all of them, and I don't know the right metric by which to judge. That does make this an interesting case IMO, as the likelihood of the losers to be upset is high (except maybe Greek mythology, since I don't think they have a strong lobby on their side).
But that's not happening. There isn't "a people" who want .amazon, there's an intergovernmental organization that supposedly wants to use the TLD for tourism purposes.
Why exactly is Amazon.com less relevant than the Amazon tourist industry? They don't want .amazon for "the people", they want it for the tourism industry which also consists of faceless corporations.
I did not even know there was an Amazon people (I knew there were tribes that lived in the Amazon rainforest, but I did not know they were "Amazon" [Amazons? Amazonians?]). Anyway, the more salient point, I think, is that Amazon the company is not named after the tourism business (to the best of my knowledge) contrary to the claim upthread.
There weren't. The Greeks had a legend about a tribe of warrior-women who lived in the forest and were known as the "Amazons", and when the Spanish first found what we now know as the Amazon forest the natives tried to fight them off.
The spanish conquistadores were so impressed by the fact that the indigenous women fought together with the men that they started calling the place the "forest of the Amazons", after the old Greek myth. The name stuck. But there was never an actual tribe called the "Amazons".
I believe Amazon's brand origin can be traced back to a stupid bit of wordplay like... "Books are made from paper, paper comes from trees, we want to sell all the books so we're naming ourselves after all the trees - hence, The Amazon"
Crucial difference here: the business chose to use the name of the extant location. The name of the region derives from that of the river, which was named by an external group, without input from the local populous (unless you count attacking a Spanish expedition as "input").
I had a similar discussion with someone after a small spat broke out over authenticity and the dreaded cultural appropriation of ... food.
Things we associate with a place, or people, a culture, or a nation can at times be surprisingly recent or not quite as we might assume or have origins we might not expect. Food in particular that gets associated with one group of people often has origins in far off places that you might not expect. Key aspects of those might have only recently been used and their origins might be the other side of the world. So what is authentic and who really "owns" that thing when everyone is combining and experimenting?
Greek myths aren't directly a source of significant monetary value, the Amazon rainforest is. Also, the rainforest was named so because the Portugese conquerors were surprised as fuck to find women fighting them alongside the men in certain tribes, so the name is meant to honor them in the first place, not ancient Greek culture.
Your comparison is more apt than the GP's, but I don't think political municipalities are apt analogs (or at least they don't capture all of the nuance at play here). What we have is heterogeneous people groups (not a single identity) who live in a particular non-political geographic region wanting another culture's name for that region. I guess it would be as though the people of the Alps decided that they should own the .alpine TLD, but that doesn't completely capture the multilingual concern you were discussing...
That highly depends on what you mean by "Greece the country". When the Greek mythologies about the Amazons were written, there was no "Greece the country". Greece didn't become a country until thousands of years later. Hell it didn't even stop being part of the Roman Empire until the 1400s.
We could have a long debate about whether the modern country of Greece has any relationship to the ancient Greek city-states, but I think that's entirely beside the point.
When was "The Amazon" a country? We're talking at best about "an identity"--I say "at best" because the Greeks have consistently had a Greek identity regardless of their political configuration at any point in history, while I'm not sure "The Amazon Nations" is an identity at all, much less a deeply-held or particularly old identity.
Of course it is beside the point. I was being pedantic to the pedantic "they can have priority when they show up", where I presumed "they" was the goddesses.
If Wonder Woman is just human how was she born with superhuman powers? Those things are mutually exclusive.
> All Themyscirian Amazons possess various degrees of superhuman strength, speed, stamina and extraordinarily acute senses and the ability to glide on aircurrents. ... Themyscirian Amazons also possess immortality that allows them to live indefinitely in a youthful form.... Themyscirian Amazons also possess the ability to relieve their bodies of physical injury and toxins by becoming one with the Earth's soil and then reforming their bodies whole again.
None of the polities in the area now called “Greece” from the time in question still exist, and the one called “Greece” in English was formed much later.
Should the people who use an .IO domain name anticipate any input about how they do business from former residents of the Chagos Archipelago, or alternatively the British military?
I'm pretty sure that national governments do have some level of control over national TLDs. Some of them don't allow privately-owned sites under their TLDs at all.
The British Indian Oceans territory was never a country, and never had any citizens. There was no indigenous people. None of the former or current residents (hired workers) ever owned any of the land.
But Barcelona refers to a specific city; a legal entity. They want the English word Amazon to refer to a group of regions, which are not one entity, who border the Amazon river (Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil). And they call that river either Amazonas or Amazona.
Furthermore, regions like this that have an official tld get a two letter tld like .eu for European Union. If they wanted to start an Amazonian Union and get a tld for it, they should! (maybe ".aa")
>>(Similarly to how Germany is .de, not .gr or something like that.)
Or how Österreich has a domain .at you mean? :P
There's already exceptions for this kind of thing all over the place. Russia has .ru despite not having a "u" anywhere in the name. Japan is .jp despite having nothing to do with Nippon.
Well Russian is typically not written in Latin script, similarly Japanese. I don't know of anyone who refers to Switzerland as the "Helvetic Confederation". If I had to compress the names of all of earth's countries (and many non-country entities) into two or three ASCII characters I don't imagine I'd have done much better.
It's worth noting that Russia does have the .рф TLD ("RF" for Russian Federation) in addition to .ru.
Considering how ubiquitous Latin keyboards are I'm OK with countries with non-Latin character sets getting a Latin equivalent as it makes those domains much more accessible to a large part of the world.
I think we're all on the same page here. Using the English name instead of a transliteration is a compromise with downsides. It was not such a bad compromise in the early days of the internet, and now that we have Unicode domains we can have native-style tlds and that's a good thing.
By exceptions I mean exceptions from the perceived standard of taking the country's name in its official language and shortening it. As observed, there are both domains which are shortened versions of the name in the official language(.de) and ones which have absolutely nothing to do with it(.at).
ISO 3166 is regularly updated to reflect changes in country names and subdivisions. These changes are done by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency (ISO3166/MA).
The maintenance agency includes representatives from the following 14 organizations:
Association française de normalisation AFNOR (France)
American National Standards Institute ANSI (United States)
British Standards Institution BSI (United Kingdom)
Deutsches Institut für Normung DIN (Germany)
Japanese Industrial Standards Committee (JISC)
Spanish Association for Standardization (UNE)
Standards Australia (SA)
Standards Council of Canada (SCC)
Swedish Standards Institute (SIS)
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)
International Telecommunication Union (ITU)
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
Universal Postal Union (UPU)
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)
I wonder how much of this is about avoiding collisions. .su would have been Soviet Union at the time. There are a lot of countries that begin with M, so I can see trying to avoid an M code for Hungary. There seems to be some precedent for steering countries away from common letters, if you read the tea leaves in the table (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2): there are lots of C countries, so Croatia ends up with .hr (from Hrvatska) and Chad ends up with .td (from Tchad), and the S countries are just a mess.
That says why it isn't .su, not why it is .fi. They could have come up with some other two letter code based on their name in their native tongue, just like all the US states beginning with "Mi" that aren't Michigan.
And Sweden isn't .sw (English "Sweden") or .sv (Swedish "Sverige") but .se. I'm assuming .sw isn't used because of possible confusion with Switzerland.
Croatia was late to the game, only getting its code when Yugoslavia broke up. By then .cr was already taken (Costa Rica). So were .ca, .co, and .ci - Canada, Colombia, Cote d'Ivoire. .ct was available though.
not necessarily, local name is Hrvatska so it's questionable if they would have assigned `.cr` had it been available. Most users of `.hr` sites are locals so it makes sense to them but have seen confusion on websites that target foreigners.
Nothing controversial at all. Just a bunch of folks speculating about it with a lack of information. There's an RFC about this and a nice wikipedia page.
Amazon has offered them subdomains based on their country code, so .br.amazon for example. But they want to share access on the root domain, but that's not really how domain name systems were designed. They are designed to be hierarchical, so it makes sense for Amazon to grant full control of a subdomain to them rather than share.
Sharing would be a security nightmare also. Imagine any cookies set for .amazon ? How would the browser share between amazon subdomains vs non if they shared the root?
Domain name systems are designed to be hierarchical, so it makes sense for Amazon to register within this hierarchy, which they already have, i.e., amazon.com.
The nations of the Amazon basin have a more complex situation regarding fitting within the hierarchy. Perhaps amazon.int?
>Because if it were for locals, it would be .amazonia and .amazonas
this assumes many, many things.
It assumes that locals do not communicate enough in English with anyone outside their locality that they can identify with the name Amazon.
It assumes that the local region does not have any interests other than tourism and commercial purposes about how their region is perceived external to the region.
If for example there was a .germany tld would you expect that the people of Germany might want to control it for something other than just tourism and commerce? I suppose they would want to control it even if there was a company called Germany somewhere in the world and Germany is stereotypically not so much into any language but German!
Amazonas is a state in Brazil (which does, admittedly, contain most of the Amazon forest - but is not the forest itself) and the Portuguese name of the river. The forest is called "Amazônia" in Portuguese.
ISOs members are the standards organisations of countries. Nothing else can join except standards organisations representing a whole country, typically a UN member state although the exact margins are a bit tricky (e.g. China and Hong Kong are both in ISO...)
So, in most cases an ISO 3166 code goes to an ISO member, they would propose what they think is the best option, and if nobody else objects they get what they asked for.
Where the country code is for some entity that isn't an independent nation state (e.g. VG and VI are for the two sets of Virgin Islands, one set belongs to the United States, the other to Britain) or for an entity that doesn't enjoy full participating membership in ISO (often very poor countries or those which don't have much diplomacy anyway so who cares what the outside world thinks) then it could be decided by somebody else, if they don't like that too bad stage a war of independence.
In some cases there's contention. For example the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland would like UK (and it has the ccTLD .uk) but Ukraine thinks it makes more sense for them to have it. So, neither gets it, Ukraine is UA and the United Kingdom is GB.
Presumably Germans thought DE was a better choice because it matches what they call themselves, whereas many other countries figured it makes sense to use their English name to choose the code, or they simply didn't care.
Ironically, Romania could have gotten .ru, since it was historically called Rumania in English until around 1970s (and is still called that in many other languages).
ISO 3166 is the standard though, I'm not sure why the consistency of the standard matters as you will need to consistently refer to the standard in order to reliably determine any country's 2 letter code.
I love how they offered $5 million in amazon kindles and hosting to them. How absolutely daft. Couldn't they just offer money? (Not that it's more likely to work, but the kindles and hosting was ridiculous).
We're not, actually. The "nations of the amazon" referred to in the article are "Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela - all members of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization"
In this case, I could see AWS hosting being useful to them (maybe even something along the lines of GovCloud like AWS runs for the US Government)
When politicians and bureaucrats talk about shared governance what these parasites are really saying is that they want royalties for Amazon being named... Amazon.
I am a Brazilian (not that it is important) and I wished Amazon had .amazon (but made it available for others to use it too) without state actors influence.
Counter examples abound, since as of August 2018 there were 59 approved internationalized country code top-level domains, 47+ of them actually used (Wikipedia)
See also .tp (Timor Português), .cs (Československo), .dd (Deutsche Demokratische Republik), .de (Deutschland), .rs (Republika Srbija), etc for examples using the latin alphabet.
> and I wished Amazon had .amazon (but made it available for others to use it too)
If only there was a way as a society we could make sure common resources could be used by interested and relevant parties in an agreeable manner. Maybe some kind of group that is formed based on the input of many people and will represent their interests in this matter and others like it. If only.
Also it's really silly for one private company to own an entire TLD just because that company choose to use a generic, commonly used word. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
...are you actually saying that because "amazon" is not used as a proper noun that disqualifies it as a common, generic word and only instances of trademark use are valid?
Because that's what your example heavily implies, based on the grammar and syntax (given your capitalization of the word amazon) of your example. I hope you're not doing that. Because that'd be ridiculous.
>Amazon in most contexts refers to the company and not the river or the rainforest.
You obviously think that based on your example as completely ridiculous as it is, and arguably this is very false and only works in the context of the U.S. market, but it's actually completely irrelevant. Amazon, a U.S. based private company that won't be around forever (hopefully not), doesn't get to have wholesale ownership of the .TLD because it named itself after a word used to describe various geographic and cultural entities.
That very obviously, rightfully, and justifiably belongs to groups and organizations who have a vested interest on all things "amazon." Not the private, ephemeral company that named itself after these geographic, cultural "things."
Amazon owns the trademark. Trademarks only work in the context of markets governed by some set of economic laws and treaties. They do not own the word. This is an absurd conversation to be having, and yet-another-example of why brand TLD's were such a bad idea. ICANN is not in the business of trademarks and it shouldn't be. Brand TLD's are a kind of uber trademark because of how TLD's are structured. It's such a bad idea. Apple the company currently has .apple. A global fruit cultivated over millennia. But somehow Apple the tech company gets it.
>Of course they don't, but they've got a very legitimate claim to own the TLD.
Not really. Once trademarks become "things", that trademark ceases to be effective and can rarely be enforced. TLD's are not for trademarks. This isn't complicated.
> A tool used globally to catch fish, birds and other animals for a millenia.
Because .net, like .com, is shorthand. ".net" is short hand for network. And Verisign is the organization responsible for maintaining that TLD's domain registry. It has nothing to do with branding or trademarks.
>A tool used globally to catch fish, birds and other animals for a millenia.
This should be your sign that you're just grasping at straws and you're not here to learn or make any kind of substantial argument.
Defining 'net' instead of 'network' was cheeky, sure, but it doesn't change the correctness of the argument one bit. It's still an ancient global concept. But one entity gets ownership of it. Why is .apple any worse? And for anything about .apple sites not being 'apple' enough, net is much worse.
Your rebuttal is the equivalent to pointing out a grammar mistake.
>but it doesn't change the correctness of the argument one bit.
It most definitely does. Because TLDs are designed to be at the top, because they are top level domains, used to house other domains in a general category. .net does not belong to a brand, it is a broad concept. So it correctly sits at the top. Other people are also able to freely register domains under that TLD.
That's a far cry from one private company owning a TLD with broad applications, just to continue to carry out its niche commercial purpose.
>Your rebuttal is the equivalent to pointing out a grammar mistake.
No it's correctly pointing out how categories work combined with the most basic of reading comprehension abilities. This is really really elementary stuff.
>Not really. Once trademarks become "things", that trademark ceases to be effective and can rarely be enforced. TLD's are not for trademarks. This isn't complicated.
Amazon (the company) has a very (probably the most) legitimate claim to the gTLD as the word is most often used to refer to the company. I'm not really sure that there's any need to bring trademarks into this.
>This should be your sign that you're just grasping at straws and you're not here to learn or make any kind of substantial argument.
It's literally the exact argument you made. I suppose this would mean that you're also grasping at straws, maybe we should start some kind of a club?
Your .apple example was pretty silly, nobody else wanted that TLD. Why should Apple not get to have it if they’re the only ones who want to pay a fuckload of money for it?
First, why would you get to decide whether Amazon.com is "enough", and what does enough even mean here?
Second, Amazon would never host their portal on amazon.amazon, it would be ridiculous. They would want www.amazon, which seems fine, or most probably shop.amazon, books.amazon, free.amazon, etc. all of which are completely in their prerogative.
Maybe Amazonians can get authority on .br.amazon, .forest.amazon, .region.amazon, or something but nothing on the top domain. It would be ridiculous for many reasons including security.
Maybe have amazon be administered by a 3rd party (verisign or whomever) and doll our subdomains to countries/amazon. Giving it directly to amazon seems not ideal..
> "globally, hundreds (if not thousands) of brands have names similar to regions, land formations, mountains, towns, cities, and other geographic places". These could be put off applying for new gTLDs because of "uncertainty" over ICANN policy over geographic names.
I guess I do not see why a company, especially one that already owns <companyName>.com, should find it necessary or feel entitled to register their brand or company name as a gTLD. In cases like this, it seems like the gTLD should be available in a way to reflect the broader meaning of the word.
I'd be okay with ICANN favouring the people from a place in any of these cases. The idea that American Airlines could own .america or that FC Barcelona could own .barcelona is much weirder than Apple owning .apple or something like that.
Having a limited set of gTLDs decided by ICANN etc didn’t really seem a long term solution either to me. ICANN itself doesn’t really seem like a solution for a truly global distributed network either, but that’s a whole other topic.
I’m not super excited about letting anyone who can afford to run a TLD make one either, but at least so far there appears to be relatively little mainstream appetite for using them.
ICANN’s UDRP already gives trademark holders huge leverage over cybersquatters, arguably too much power. Not sure we need much more in this regard. If you look at the UDRP’s case load, it’s extremely rare for trademark holders to lose a UDRP case.
All of these are examples of Brand TLDs (https://icannwiki.org/Brand_TLD), which can be registered as part of ICANNs New TLD program which started in 2012.
As many 'new' TLDs (such as the ones introduced in the 2000s such as .travel, .museum and .mobi), many of them are not used a lot, and many people are not familiar with them.
True, but let's say I start an apple reseller and want store.apple. That would be just fine on all counts; should Apple Computer have every instance of the word "Apple" reserved for them just because they're bigger? It would frankly be irresponsible for some companies not to: as consumers get used to esoteric TLDs, it could become a phishing concern.
Doesn't that apply only if the other company is a competitor to you? E.g. a shoemaker named Microsoft could get the domain if it was clear they're using the name fairly.
Yes. But note that it'll cost you about $1M per year to do this. There is no refund when you realise a week later that you have no purpose for .friendster or whatever, and you wish you still had $1M instead.
Several huge corporations bought the TLD for their long-winded name, and then it sits unused, because it's stupid. For example the TLD kerryproperties exists and is owned by the corporation Kerry Properties in Asia, but kerryprops.com is a much better name and so unsurprisingly the company's actual web site remains https://www.kerryprops.com/ and they just burn the money on the TLD for no reason.
They wouldn't use amazon.amazon obviously. Some options would include www.amazon, store.amazon, home.amazon, {product_category}.amazon, ec2.amazon, aws.amazon, etc.
See how we're using .google for some examples (which fortunately is a completely made-up word, hence no contentions).
I think the product category thing is most likely. They already do a form of {product_category}.amazon, except in reverse: amazon.{product_category}. See:
Here's my /etc/resolv.conf (I'm running Linux, though the theory is cross-platform):
# Generated by NetworkManager
search my-university.edu
nameserver their-dns-server-ip
nameserver their-other-dns-server-ip
nameserver their-third-dns-server-ip
DNS queries get sent to the nameserver, but the search domain is what's important here. The search domain is used to resolve non-fully-qualified domain names. So if I just type in http://cs, that's not a FQDN since there are no .s - with cs.my-university.edu, it goes edu->my-university->cs, but just cs is not fully qualified. So since the search domain is 'my-unversity.edu', if I just type in http://cs into the browser, it will look up cs.my-university.edu.
In your case, going to the URL ai.uwaterloo.ca redirects to the URL you linked. Adding the trailing . to ai makes it fully qualified, so going to "http://ai." makes your DNS lookup just 'ai' instead of 'ai.uwaterloo.ca'.
The search domain stuff is mostly useful for addressing other devices on the network. My home router sets the search domain to 'lan' when configuring DHCP devices, so I can use my-server as a hostname and it will resolve to my home server's IP. E.g. "ssh my-server" will turn into "ssh my-server.lan" which gets resolved by the router's DNS server to the correct IP.
Yes, localhost IS the exception. There is a lot of code that treats "localhost" specially. IIRC Chrome will let you do things on localhost:XXXX that are normally only possible for sites over HTTPS (Think geolocating and some other privacy-related things).
English is the de facto language of international relations, more so than any other language anyway. And English is also the working language of ICANN, IETF, and any other technical body dealing with the Internet I can think of.
Point is, the fact that slightly different words are used in Spanish and Portuguese really doesn't matter. They might also want those words as well, but they have claim over the English version too. For example, even though the word for Japan in Japanese isn't "Japan", ICANN would never delegate that TLD to anyone else besides the Japanese government (and indeed even that TLD would be unlikely to be created because it's redundant with the .jp ccTLD).
The "com" is from "commercial," which is maybe more distinct in contrast with other types of entities: "org" or "edu". Of course, that use has largely been diluted today, but it does have an inherent meaning.
How is it a poor equivalency? https://amazon is an attempt at just entering the tld without anything else and https://com is entering the tld without anything else. Just because https://amazon.com exists, doesn't mean "amazon" in and of itself means anything in the grand scheme of things.
And my point was that com alone would lead nowhere reasonable (aside from the Verisign NIC page), but Amazon by itself could very well lead to amazon's webpage.
Amazon has a commercial trademark on some specific areas of commerce. There are many other Amazon trademarks owned by other people, even in the US alone.
Sure. But you asked how it was different. Amazon has a domain name under a commercial TLD, .com. It doesn't have it's brand as a TLD, nor should anyone.
Amazon does have a very good claim to make that in the commercial space, people associate the word "amazon" with the company. It might not always be that way, but right now that is a very reasonable claim.
If you think someone else should have amazon the domain, no one should have amazon, or whatever else, that's a nifty conversation to have. But it's not what is being discussed.
They're both domains, I'm asking why should they be treated differently, just because they're at different levels.
The reason given was that the context was too broad, but so is the "commercial" context across the whole world.
If Amazon should have the second level domain because it's the most well know association of the word at the commerce level, then why shouldn't it be given the top level domain if it has the most well known association of the word, period?
> If Amazon should have the second level domain because it's the most well know association of the word at the commerce level, then why shouldn't it be given the top level domain if it has the most well known association of the word, period?
The second question is a lot wider in scope and harder to answer, for one. It's usually beneficial to narrow scope to make problems easier to solve.
Easy test that might give us a hint, compare the google search results between
'"amazon.com" -site:amazon.com'
'"the amazon" OR "amazon rainforest" OR "amazon river"'
At least on google, amazon.com returns vastly more stuff. Hell, even '"Amazon" AND "Bezos"' gets way more hits than '"amazon rainforest" OR "amazon river"'
Obviously this is far from conclusive, but it's something. Google trends might also be an useful tool.
"The fact that you thought this would be a convincing argument is extremely laughable and again, palpably ridiculous."
Which actually probably better applies to your statement about Google specifically being built for US consumers, which is obviously nonsense.
Google works great in Finnish which is a terribly complicated and small language, doesn't seem like an US consumer only product to me.
And anyway, if we're going to focus on the English language word for the Amazon river, then we'd be better off focusing on the English-speaking market. A quick look at wikipedia shows that very few languages besides English use "Amazon".
>I'm asking why should they be treated differently, just because they're at different levels.
Well, you didn't ask that. But objectively that's what happens in taxonomies. Taxonomies are inherently, principally based on human experience and understanding. In your case what you're asking to do is just use the word "square" to refer to the set of all different shapes just because square might be the most used word when attempting to describe a shape. And that doesn't make sense. At least I hope you can agree with that.
>The reason given was that the context was too broad, but so is the "commercial" context across the whole world.
Commercial is a TLD because it's broad. TLD's, by their nature, are designed to be at the very top of the domain taxonomy. Hence the name "Top Level Domain." It's at the top. So when you say Amazon, a private company that won't be around forever, should get the amazon TLD you are creating a very weird situation where Amazon the company has cemented itself not as a company but just a thing that can be used to encapsulate other "things." Even despite the fact that Amazon the company named itself after the Amazon River which was named that way because of the amazon warriors.
That's a lot of amazon. Maybe, just maybe, amazon the private company shouldn't get to own that category? Since principally there is nothing to further classify the amazon TLD as belonging to amazon the company, and not say the amazon river. That's what .com is for.
Trademark law in general already deals with the fact that words can become generic. And when that happens that trademark ceases to be effective. This should be a sign that any kind of brand TLD is completely nonsensical, because private company brands do not belong in TLDs, because TLDs are meant to house other names/concepts that have more concrete usages. Not specific companies that use their name from other concepts or higher level concepts.
TLDs are for things, categories, high level groups. Not for trademarks.
I already got your argument on why Amazon shouldn't get the "amazon." domain, what I still don't get is how those arguments don't also apply to "amazon.com."
> So when you say Amazon, a private company that won't be around forever, should get the amazon TLD you are creating a very weird situation where Amazon the company has cemented itself not as a company but just a thing that can be used to encapsulate other "things."
Right. And when one says Amazon should get the amazon.com SLD, we are creating a very weird situation where "Amazon.com Inc. P.O. Box 8102. Reno, NV 89507" has cemented itself as the only entity who can encapsulate all commercial activity in the world under the term "Amazon".
> Even despite the fact that Amazon the company named itself after the Amazon River which was named that way because of the amazon warriors.
Exactly. And the river has had plenty of commercial activity long before "Amazon.com Inc. P.O. Box 8102. Reno, NV 89507" came around. Why is it OK for that to be subsumed by "amazon.com." anymore than the rest can be subsumed by "amazon." ?
> Maybe, just maybe, amazon the private company shouldn't get to own that category? Since principally there is nothing to further classify the amazon TLD as belonging to amazon the company, and not say the amazon river. That's what .com is for.
But there's no "amazon the company". There are many, many companies called Amazon, or using the Amazon brand. If it's ok for a single specific instance of "amazon companies" to get "amazon.com", why is it not ok for a single specific instance of "amazon" to get "amazon." ?
> TLDs are for things, categories, high level groups. Not for trademarks.
Why should only TLDs be for that? Why shouldn't second-level (or even third!) domains be for that too? "Amazon.com Inc. P.O. Box 8102. Reno, NV 89507" could get "amazon.retail.com.us", for example. That would be more in line with how trademarks actually work.
>And when one says Amazon should get the amazon.com SLD, we are creating a very weird situation where "Amazon.com Inc. P.O. Box 8102. Reno, NV 89507" has cemented itself as the only entity who can encapsulate all commercial activity in the world under the term "Amazon".
Well that's how the domain structure is currently laid out. Someone has to get it. If you're just going to argue that the domain system needs more finesse, just say that. But asking these round about questions is pointless. At some point "amazon" the company gets a domain. right now that's the SLD, as it is for everyone else. ICANN has an appeal system if you think you deserve it more for whatever reason.
>Why is it OK for that to be subsumed by "amazon.com."
Because amazon purchased the domain. The domain points to a specific server. It's not a TLD that acts a registry for other domains. There is a very important difference there. One you don't seem to appreciate.
>If it's ok for a single specific instance of "amazon companies" to get "amazon.com", why is it not ok for a single specific instance of "amazon" to get "amazon." ?
I'm going to stop right here, because you're just arguing that the current domain system is broken. And that's not what we're discussing. I'm not sure what the motivation is for doing that is, but it doesn't belong here.
>Why should only TLDs be for that?
Because that's how categories and taxonomies work. I gave you an example with shapes. Hopefully you understand shapes.
Firstly, the current domain name system has included brand TLDs like https://home.barclays/ for years. So you're the one saying it's broken, if you think those TLDs shouldn't exist. Arguments like "that's how the domain structure is currently laid out" work for Amazon getting a TLD, not against it.
So we're not discussing how it works. We're discussing how you think it should work. And my request has been the same since the beginning: explain how the domains of level 1 are different from levels 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.
Your argument around taxonomies absolutely doesn't explain this. Taxonomies may be - and usually are - many levels deep.
That's kind of an overstatement. This argument has been brought up multiple times. And no one can counter it except to say "but money." And it hasn't really been included for years. It's been discussed for years.
>So we're not discussing how it works.
I mean very much, based on the historical record in front of you, unless an HN has edited the posts, we very much are. You are concretely wrong.
> We're discussing how you think it should work.
No that IS how it works. Brand TLD's are a very new concept. With very limited surface area coverage, and very little actual use.
I understand that some of you need to see how things fuck up before understanding how things could fuck up, but I think I spelled it out very clearly. Again I even used shapes. If you're going to argue about the semantics of shapes, I think you should adjust your opinions on this subject. Because it is tightly 1-1.
>Your argument around taxonomies absolutely doesn't explain this.
I explicitly referenced the domain specification and what their purpose is. I explained how taxonomies generally work. I explained how the domain taxonomy is laid out and its intended purpose. The fact that ICANN went for a quick money grab doesn't negate this. I understand that the HN technopoly cult thinks this justifies everything. But it doesn't. At least not logically or rationally or justifiably.
You're just trying to turn this into a metargument. Please respond with something concrete. For the love of god redeem this forum.
I understood the "semantics of shapes". What I struggled to understand, again, is how that doesn't apply to other domains as well. And I know I'm not a very bright person, but it shouldn't be something hard to explain succinctly.
From what I understand now, you argument is based on historical precedent: TLDs are different because they were treated differently (as general taxonomies, whereas domains of other levels were not) before the ICANN money-grab.
Fair enough. I don't find it convincing, but then again conservative arguments rarely appeal to me.
>Because amazon purchased the domain. The domain points to a specific server. It's not a TLD that acts a registry for other domains. There is a very important difference there. One you don't seem to appreciate.
There's essentially no technical difference between a TLD and a domain name. Any practical difference is extremely questionable too.
>There's essentially no technical difference between a TLD and a domain name.
Yes there is. You just need to stop talking about this subject because you are very much wrong.
TLDs have authoritative organizations that adhere to ICANN regulations and act as a gatekeeper to a varied and diverse set of domains under that TLD. Certain TLDs have specific purposes. Some are country codes, others are specific scopes, some others are built in from decades past.
If I am so wrong would you mind describing any of the significant technical difference between TLDs and and domain names? I would seriously appreciate it if you could share your expertise on this topic.
None of the TLD nameserver configs I’ve encountered have seemed very special, in fact they’re exactly like the nameservers for normal domains.
I don't get why Amazon would get control of the entire TLD. Can't these new TLDs be managed by some other entity which hands out domains to those that want them?
The proposed names (books.amazon, tourism.amazon, br.amazon) all seem to be dancing around what I suspect is going to be a big fight: Who gets www.amazon?
Amazon the company does, obviously. The only actual fight will be how much Amazon ends up paying to the nations of the amazon to use the name. (i suspect it will be zero)
technically yes, there's nothing special about www and no actual reason that a TLD can't be resolved directly.
However, icann policy forbids 'dotless' domains, and most browsers will probably default to doing a web search if you enter a word that doesn't look like a domain in the address bar.
The nation-prefix suggestion could actually be reasonable if Amazon.com Inc. were also limited to its own prefix, say .inc.amazon. I assume that's not what was proposed.
Wouldn't it be better to petition to get .acto as their representative cctld equivalent?
Maybe I'm just old fashioned or something but it feels more "official" to use a shortened/acronym/initialization than to want to use .amazon, which is also already established as the brand rather than the location
Amazon the brand named themselves after the river - their original logo was a depiction of a river. It was well established as a location by the 1990s.
So if you saw an ad with nothing else but "visit now at https://goto.amazon" you might potentially think "that's probably a place get info on the river and/or the rainforest"? I have my doubts, but each to their own
"Go to" implies going to a physical place, so for this specific example I actually disagree and would assume that it would belong to some Amazonian tourist board. But for most other examples I'd probably assume Amazon the company.
Turning this around: So if you saw an ad with nothing else but "visit now at https://goto.acto" you might potentially think "that's probably a place get info on the river and/or the rainforest"?
>Users can now end their website names with more than 1,200 new extensions, including .blog and .you
This is a caption for a photo in the article, but .you isn't actually available. It's currently owned by Amazon, but they don't offer it to the general public. I'm not sure if they actually use it at all.
This feels like as much an attempt to typo-squat on the existing tld. I don't know why else they wouldn't go with the Spanish equivalent. Also, if they want it for tourism (the other possibility), I don't see why they have any more of a right to it than Amazon, Inc. First-come, First-served.
It's amazing that Amazon's people miss an easy chance to score some good will.
"Of course, we'll defer to the people who actually live in the Amazon because their cultural identity and heritage should obviously outlast our corporate branding."
That is your personal opinion. To me and plenty others, there are a lot of legitimate uses for short and dynamic domains under .amazon, including shop.amazon, computers.amazon, books.amazon, category.amazon, videos.amazon, etc.
In particular, I'd like to be able to teach my relatives to type in "some_product_they_want.amazon" in their search bar and be sure they will always land at a reputable place. Remember browsers are increasingly hiding URLs, so ensuring the domain is legit is incredibly important.
This seems to be an error by submitter rather than the BBC too unless the BBC have changed their title.
(Technically you can get into pedantry and point out that a top level domain is by definition a domain, but that's just not how people use the word and the headline is therefore left misleading).
Because if it were for locals, it would be .amazonia and .amazonas. (Similarly to how Germany is .de, not .gr or something like that.)
And not that tourism means they don't deserve the name... but it's not like this has anything to do with indigenous rights or a business trampling a people.
It's just a globally-known tourism business vs. a globally-known shopping business.
So not exactly something I can find myself caring about much. What do ICANN's rules already say? Does it go to whoever first registers, or whoever pays the most?