Retail Giant Amazon Faces Pushback Over .Amazon Geographic Domain At ICANN Annual Meeting

ABU DHABI, UAE — Government representatives from several countries in the Amazonas region clashed with a team of lawyers and communication officers of the global retailer Amazon over the top-level domain .amazon during the Annual Meeting of the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names Numbers (ICANN) in Abu Dhabi today.

The ICANN Board had decided not to advance Amazon’s application for the name, but an independent review panel (IRP) deciding against the board, putting the issue back on the table, to the dismay of a number of governments.

The annual ICANN meeting 60 is taking place from 28 October to 3 November.

Amazon during a dedicated session made an offer to work with governments on the policies for an amazon domain to avoid the registrations of domains sensitive to the countries. The company, which underlined that it had checked all the boxes during the application process, said it also would support applications of the region for .amazonas, amazonia or .amazonica and even consider to sponsor applications or the back-end registry services.

Companies like yours do whatever they want to do – Peruvian government to Amazon retail giant

María Milagros Castañon Seoane, Peruvian representative in the ICANN Government Advisory Committee, flatly rejected the offer, telling the Amazon representative: “Companies like yours do whatever they want to do. Companies like yours persist in not respecting the governments and the communities we represent. I don’t represent your company. I represent my people.”

Her more diplomatic Brazilian colleague, Benedicto Fonseca, underlined that the Amazon countries were bound by a ministerial decision at OCTA, the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization. Fonseca acknowledged that both requests, from Amazon and the eight Amazon countries, were legitimate, but delegation and granting exclusive rights to the company was a highly sensitive issue for the countries involved.

A number of governments chimed in in support of the Amazonas countries, namely Portugal and France, also arguing that the request from ICANN‘s Board of Directors to revisit their earlier “advice” could set a bad precedent, as well as the delegation of a TLD with a geographical name.

How geographical TLDs, as well as letter 2 and letter 3 codes for countries should be handled in future TLD applications rounds is currently under heavy debate in the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee and the ICANN community.

Robin Gross, executive director of IP Justice, during a discussion between the Non-Commercial User Constituency (NCUC) with governments warned not to create new rights with regard to geographic names at ICANN. She suggested instead to use the regular fora for this like the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

But the outgoing Chair of the GAC, Thomas Schneider, pointed out that assuming that trademark rights to a name automatically resulted in an exclusive right to a TLD was a fallacy. Amazon Associate Counsel for IP Dana Brown Northcott said after the clash with the governments that the company would continue to seek a compromise solution, but certainly had to consider all options.

In 2010, ICANN in a similar case lost and finally agreed to the introduction of .xxx by ICM Registry.

 

Image Credits: Monika Ermert