Recent Posts
- ICANN publishes its Woke Manifesto. Here’s my hot take
- Alibaba, Name.com among new RDRS opt-ins
- The Swiss can register .swiss domains from next week
- .ai up to 425,000 domains
- A million “free” .music domains up for grabs
- D3 to get $5 million in crypto to apply for .ape gTLD
- Alibaba hit with ICANN breach notice
- New Vegas conference “Davos for Web3 interoperability”
- ICANN content policing power grab may be dead
- Cable company unplugs its dot-brand after acquisition
- Germany crosses 10,000 dot-brand domains milestone
- Founders out as Com Laude gets equity injection
- PIR’s Diaz to leave domain industry
- Some registrars have already quit ICANN’s Whois experiment
- ICANN opens $217 million Grant Program
- Internet could get one-letter gTLDs (but there’s a catch)
- .ai registry fights deadbeats with tweaked auction rules
- Amazon and Google among .internal TLD ban backers
- .ai registry advises buyers not to use GoDaddy
- .post liberalizes with new sunrise period
- Team Internet spends $41 million on content farm
- Epik backtracks on Kiwi Farms claim after legal threat
- .austin names launch on blockchain
- Freenom shuts down 12.6 million domains — report
- GoDaddy’s next .xxx contract may not be a done deal
- GlobalBlock blocking 2.5 million domains
- Microsoft moving its cloud apps from .com to .microsoft
- ICANN 79: anonymous trolls and undercover lawyers
- ICANN scores win in single-letter .com lawsuit
- Cosmetics brand terminates its gTLD
- Up to 70 jobs on the line at Nominet as .uk regs dwindle
- Governments back down on new gTLD next round delay
- Private auctions could be banned in new gTLD next round
- ICANN meeting venue “insensitive and hurtful”
- GoDaddy to start selling graphic.design domains
- GAC spinning up new gTLD curveball at ICANN 79?
- GoDaddy’s GlobalBlock supports blockchain names
- Police .uk domain takedowns dive in 2023
- GoDaddy wants to cut the bullshit from .xxx
- Dueling domain blocking services to launch at ICANN 79
- Freename tries to bridge DNS and blockchain
- Olive retires from ICANN
- Whois policy published without life-saving disclosure rule
- UK gov takes its lead from ICANN on DNS abuse
- Tucows reports 2023 results
- Twitter “completely unresponsive” on clickable domains
- ICANN spends $5 million more than planned in first fiscal half
- .art takes a million domains off its premium list
- KeyTrap ‘the most devastating vulnerability ever found in DNSSEC’
- Freenom settles $500 million Meta lawsuit and will exit domain business
- New gTLD lottery to return in 2026
- First GlobalBlock prices revealed — they ain’t cheap
- Domain universe grows on new gTLDs despite .com shrinkage
- D3 signs up crypto gTLD client number five
- GoDaddy reports strong domains growth
- How to qualify for a $40,000 gTLD
- Registry service provider evaluation handbook published
- WebUnited inks deal to “mirror” country’s TLD in the blockchain
- GoDaddy project unveils brand-blocking calculator
- Report: Monster “misappropriated” millions from Epik
- .com is shrinking but Verisign raises prices again anyway
- D3 announces fourth crypto new gTLD client
- Donald Trump loses second UDRP case
- UK cybersquatting complaints hit record low
- No excuses! PIR to pay for ALL registries to tackle child abuse
- ICANN insists it is working on linkification
- Namecheap sues ICANN over .org price caps
- GoDaddy offers free Ethereum blockchain integration
- Epik reveals who is running the company
- Epik gets acquired again! The plot thickens…
- Airline gTLD crashes and burns
- First chunks of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook drop
- Epik to reveal its owners soon
- Another crypto firm to apply for a new gTLD
- Monster and Royce are NOT involved in Epik?!
- Nominet to overhaul .uk registry, turn off some services
- Russia blames DNSSEC, not Ukraine, for internet downtime
- Team Internet says revenue beat estimates
- Sold for over $20k, insure.ai and dog.ai back in .ai’s expired names auction
- .ai helps UDRP cases rise in 2023, WIPO says
- Freenom’s domains land at Gandi after termination
- .ru domains fly off the shelf as Western sanctions bite
- ICANN picks its first ever Supreme Court
- Lebanon’s ccTLD going back to Lebanon after ICANN takeover
- ICANN picks the domain it will never, ever release
- ICANN approves domain takedown rules
- Has Epik gone “woke”?
- First bits of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook expected next week
- ICANN bans closed generics for the foreseeable
- You can’t use money to buy .box domains
- After 14 years, ICANN practices what it preaches on IDNs
- Weak demand for private Whois data, ICANN data shows
- .ing doing way better than .meme
- DNS Women barred from ICANN funding?
- Dev releases free open-source TLD registry platform
- INCO flips a gTLD to Identity Digital
- Anguilla fears the .ai junk drop
- Five more gTLDs get launch dates
- $10 million of ICANN cash up for grabs
- Almost 50,000 .ai domains sold in a quarter
- ICANN threatens to regulate your speech [RANT]
- Life insurance company kills dot-brand
- ICANN finds new home for Lebanon’s TLD after founder’s death
- ICANN begs people to use its new Whois service
- Shiba Inu outs itself as crypto new gTLD applicant
- Over 50,000 .ai domains sold in three months
- Amazon planning new push into registrar market?
- Registries and registrars vote ‘Yes’ to new DNS abuse rules
- ICANN predicts flattish 2025 for domain industry
- Fast-growing Gname buys another 150 registrars
- GoDaddy service to let you block domains in over 650 TLDs
- Did I find a murder weapon in a zone file?
- ICANN drops the “man” from Ombudsman
- Have your say on police domain takedown powers
- Most registrars are shunning ICANN’s new Whois system
- Nominet to take over .gov.uk
- ICANN picks Istanbul for 2024 meeting
- ICANN’s private Whois data request service goes live
- .au regs slide on 2LD anniversary
- ICANN accused of power grab over $271 million auction fund
- A registrar is getting blamed for an Israeli war propaganda site
- Two more dot-brands bite the dust
- Google sells five-figure AI domain and six-figure .ing hack
- .blackfriday is still a bit rubbish
- Internet Naming Co acquires five more gTLDs
Amazon offered $5 million of free Kindles for .amazon gTLD
Amazon offered South American governments $5 million worth of free Kindles, content and cloud services in exchange for their endorsement of its .amazon gTLD application, it has emerged.
The proposal, made in February, also included an offer of four years of free hosting up to a value of $1 million.
The sweeteners came during negotiations with the eight governments of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, which object to .amazon because they think it would infringe on their geographical and cultural rights.
Amazon has sought to reassure these governments that it will reserve culturally sensitive strings of their choice in .amazon, and that it will actively support any future applications for gTLDs such as .amazonas, which is the more meaningful geographic string in local languages.
I’ve reported on these offers before, but to my knowledge the offer of free Kindles and AWS credits has not been made public before. (UPDATE: Nope.)
According to a September letter from ACTO, published (pdf) this week, Amazon told it:
as an indication of goodwill and support for the people and governments of the Amazonian Region… [Amazon will] make available to the OTCA governments credits for the use of AWS services, Kindles preloaded with mutually agreed upon content, and similar Amazon.com services and products in an amount not to exceed $5,000,000.
Amazon also offered to set up a .amazon web site “to support the Amazonian people’s cultural heritage” and pay up to $1 million to host it for four years.
These kinds of financial sweeteners would not be without precedent.
The applicant for .bar wound up offering to donate $100,000 to fund a school in Montenegro, after the government noted the string match with the Bar region of the country.
The ACTO countries met in August to consider Amazon’s offer, but chose not to accept it.
However, they’re not closing off talks altogether. Instead, they’ve taken up ICANN on its offer to act as a facilitator of talks between Amazon and ACTO members.
The ICANN board of directors passed a resolution last month instructing CEO Goran Marby to “support the development of a solution” that would involve “sharing the use of those top-level domains with the ACTO member states”.
ACTO secretary general Jacqueline Mendoza has responded positively to this resolution (pdf) and invited Marby to ACTO headquarters in Brasilia to carry on these talks.
Why dont they offer cash?
For a trillion dollar company that’s literally pennies. How insulting.
There’s a difference between market cap and cash on hand. AMZN has “only” $27B cash on hand.
Well, that certainly seems to have softened the opposition. Money solves all problems!
RESOLVED, THE BOARD DIRECTS THE PRESIDENT AND CEO OR HIS DESIGNEE TO REMOVE THE “WILL NOT PROCEED” STATUS AND RESUME PROCESSING OF THE .AMAZON’S APPLICATIONS ACCORDING TO THE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES GOVERNING THE 2012 ROUND OF THE NEW gTLD PROGRAM. THIS INCLUDES THE PUBLICATION OF THE PUBLIC INTEREST COMMITMENTS AS WELL AS AS PROPOSED BY THE AMAZON CORPORATION COORDINATING TO THE ESTABLISHED PROCEDURES OF THE NEW gTLD PROGRAM. RESOLVED, THE BOARD DIRECTS THE PRESIDENT AND CEO OR HIS DESIGNEES TO PROVIDE REGULAR UPDATES TO THE BOARD ON THE STATUS OF THE .AMAZON APPLICATIONS.
This is probably what the whole maneuver was out to do in the first place. After all, the gTLD for the region should be .AMAZONAS.