Amazon Company Bid For New Domain .amazon Runs Into Trouble At ICANN

By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch

US online retailer Amazon’s quest for their own top level domain, .amazon, might be doomed after the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today agreed it should be rejected.

Representatives of Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Chile appealed to their colleagues in the GAC to support “advice” to the ICANN Board to reject the application from the US company. Brazil, according to its GAC representative, had discussed the issue with the company on several occasions, but there was no way to reconcile the conflicting interests.

“We understand their business model,” the Brazilian GAC representative said, adding that nobody thought the other side acted in bad faith. Still, as a delegation of the geographical name would affect communities in eight countries in Latin America it had to be rejected in the “public interest.”

Peru’s GAC representative said it is “striking that there is a prior search on trademarks during the sunrise period, but there is no list or no searching mechanisms for geographic names.”

As no country attending objected to the proposal, the GAC now will send “consensus advice” to the ICANN Board to reject .amazon and various non-latin script versions of it.

Amazon had originally applied for 76 TLDs, including several generic ones. Sports equipment vendor Patagonia earlier withdrew its application after a battle with Argentina.

The US National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced [pdf] it would stay neutral where there was GAC consensus on objections to geographic names.

According to rules jointly established by GAC and the ICANN Board, “if GAC Advice is based on a consensus of the GAC, it will create a strong presumption that the application should not be approved. If the ICANN Board does not act in accordance with this type of advice, it must provide rationale for doing so.“