Amazon Loses Bid For .Amazon Domain

http://marketingland.com/amazon-loses-bid-amazon-domain-84315

by nilmonibasak • 12 years ago

46 73 12 years ago

marketingland.com

Igglyboo• 12 years ago

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

maaarghk• 12 years ago

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

genericuser3• 12 years ago

.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.

qaz_plm• 12 years ago

commercial

motoboi• 12 years ago

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.

tjr• 12 years ago

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

forgottenpass2• 12 years ago

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.

jp5553• 12 years ago

"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.

bnegreve• 12 years ago

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.

cylinder• 12 years ago

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.

genericuser3• 12 years ago

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.

deelowe• 12 years ago

"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.

blueyellow2• 12 years ago

There's a big difference there.

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

pessimizer• 12 years ago

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

jebus989• 12 years ago

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.

cantankerous• 12 years ago

"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.

ForHackernews3• 12 years ago

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.

JoshTriplett2• 12 years ago

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.

a3n• 12 years ago

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

gnopgnip• 12 years ago

.com is for commercial

leorocky• 12 years ago

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.

astrodust• 12 years ago

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

"amazon.sketchysite.cn"? Seems legit!

skizm• 12 years ago

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.

vidarh• 12 years ago

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.

Kequc2• 12 years ago

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.

pjc50• 12 years ago

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.

verelo2• 12 years ago

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.

pkfrank• 12 years ago

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.

dijit• 12 years ago

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

verelo2• 12 years ago

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.

CalRobert2• 12 years ago

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.

wpietri• 12 years ago

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.

pacofvf• 12 years ago

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

fiatjaf3• 12 years ago

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.

zokier6• 12 years ago

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.

fiatjaf3• 12 years ago

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.

pragmaticalien8• 12 years ago

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.

ForHackernews3• 12 years ago

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

Pxtl• 12 years ago

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.

michaelbuckbee• 12 years ago

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.

Grue3• 12 years ago

Maybe they should apply for .amazoncom

Their main page could be www.amazoncom

zokier6• 12 years ago

oh, i got the bestest idea:

    .amazon·com

I can't imagine anyone being confused about that.

Amazon Loses Bid For .Amazon Domain

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