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Amazon tells power-hungry governments to get stuffed

Kevin Murphy, April 23, 2019, 17:33:35 (UTC), Domain Policy

Amazon has rejected attempts by South American governments to make the would-be gTLD .amazon “jointly owned”.

In a letter to ICANN last week, Amazon VP of public policy Brian Huseman finally publicly revealed the price Amazon is willing to pay for its dot-brand, but said members of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization are asking for way too much power.

It turns out three of ACTO’s eight national government members have proposed solutions to the current impasse, but Amazon has had to reject them all for commercial and security reasons. Huseman wrote (pdf):

Some member states require that we jointly own and manage the .AMAZON TLDs. Some require that we give the member states advance notice and veto authority over all domain names that we want to register and use—for both trademarked terms as well as generic words. Some suggest a Governance Committee can work only if it has governance that outweighs Amazon’s voice (i.e. the Governance Committee has a representative from one of each of the eight member states, while Amazon has one); and some want to use .AMAZON for their own commercial purposes.

From Huseman’s description, it sounds like the ACTO nations basically want majority control (at least in terms of policy) of .amazon and the Chinese and Japanese translations, applications for which have been essentially frozen by ICANN for years.

Huseman told ICANN that Amazon cannot comply.

If the company were to give eight South American governments advanced notice and veto power over .amazon domains it planned to register, it would make it virtually impossible to contain its business secrets prior to the launch of new services, he said.

The governments also want the right to block certain unspecified generic strings, unrelated to the Amazon region, he wrote. Amazon can’t allow that, because its range of businesses is broad and it may want to use those domains for its own commercial purposes.

Amazon has offered to block up to 1,500 strings per TLD that “represent the culture and heritage of the Amazonia region”.

Nine .amazon domains would be set aside for actual usage, one for ACTO and one each for its members, “that have primary and well-recognized significance to the culture and heritage of the region”, but they’d have to use those domains non-commercially.

The proposal seems to envisage that the countries would select their two-letter country code as their freebie domain. Brazil could get br.amazon, for example.

They could also select the names of Amazonian indigenous peoples’ groups or “the specific terms OTCA, culture, heritage, forest, river, and rainforest, in English, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish.”

They would not to be allowed to use third-level domains, other than “www”.

The governments would have up to two years to populate the list of 1,500 banned terms. The strings would have to have the same “culture and heritage” nexus, and Amazon would get veto power over whether the proposed strings actually meet that test.

As the whole policy would be enshrined as a Public Interest Commitment in the .amazon registry contract with ICANN, ACTO members would be able to protest such rejections using the PIC Dispute Resolution Policy.

Amazon would also get veto power over the content of the web sites at the domains used by the governments. They’d have to be basically static sites, and all user-generated content would be strictly verboten.

It’s a power struggle, with little evident common ground once you get down into the details, and it’s likely going to be up to ICANN to decide whether Amazon’s proposal is sufficient to overrule the ACTO and Governmental Advisory Committee concerns.

ICANN had set a deadline of April 21 to receive the proposal. The timetable it has previously set out would see its board of directors make a decision (or punt it back to Amazon) at the Marrakech public meeting in late June.

However, board chair Cherine Chalaby has told ACTO that if it wants to negotiate a joint proposal with Amazon, it can still do so. ICANN would need to receive this revised proposal by June 7, he said.

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Comments (8)

  1. Rubens Kuhl says:

    The business secrets point is bogus. As soon as the domain makes to the zone file, it’s no longer a secret.

    • andrew says:

      Sure, but they can do it the day they plan to launch rather than X days in advance

      • Kevin Murphy says:

        Yeah, giving a council of eight bickering national governments advance notice of every new registration would seriously hamper Amazon’s ability to launch new services without leaks.

    • Rob says:

      Not true at all. You can easily Register a domain and not put in in a zone file. In the .sucks for domain, we have a lot of domains that are registered but the Registrant has chosen not to put a DNS server on them, which means they are not in the zone file.

      It always makes me smile when I read stats from websites that report stats on how many domains are registered in any given TLD. The reality the zone file is NOT a definitive source of that at all.

  2. Jay says:

    explore.amazon is nice.

    • Rubens Kuhl says:

      The verb “explorar” in Portuguese has a negative meaning similar to “exploit” in English, so they would just reinforce some of the opposing arguments if they do that.

  3. Gianni says:

    Amazon…not power hungry at all of course 😀

Leave a Reply to Rubens Kuhl