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Amazon beats South America! Dot-brand contracts now signed

Kevin Murphy, December 23, 2019, 13:22:46 (UTC), Domain Policy

Amazon has prevailed in its seven-year battle to obtain the right to run .amazon as a branded top-level domain.
The company signed contracts for .amazon and the Chinese and Japanese translations on Thursday, despite years-long protests from the eight South American governments that comprise the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization.
This means the three gTLDs are likely to be entered into the DNS root system within a matter of weeks, after ICANN has conducted pre-delegation testing to make sure the registry’s technical systems are up to standard. The back-end is being provided by Neustar, so this is pretty much a formality.
.amazon is pretty much a done deal, in other words, and there’s pretty much nothing ACTO can do within the ICANN system to get the contract unsigned.
ACTO was of course angry about .amazon because it thinks the people of the Amazonia region have greater rights to the string than the American e-commerce giant.
It had managed to muster broad support against the gTLD applications from its Governmental Advisory Committee colleagues until the United States, represented on the GAC by the National Telecommunications Administration did a U-turn this November and withdrew its backing for the consensus.
This coincided with Amazon hiring David Redl, the most-recent former head of the NTIA, as a consultant.
The applications were originally rejected by ICANN due to a GAC objection in 2013.
But Amazon invoked ICANN’s Independent Review Process to challenge the decision and won in 2017, with the IRP panel ruling that ICANN had paid too much deference to unjustified GAC demands.
More recently, ACTO had been demanding shared control of .amazon, while Amazon had offered instead to protect cultural interests through a series of Public Interest Commitments in its registry agreements that would be enforceable by governments via the PIC Dispute Resolution Procedure.
This wasn’t enough for ACTO, and the GAC demanded that ICANN facilitate bilateral talks with Amazon to come to a mutually acceptable solution.
But these talks never really got underway, largely due to ACTO internal disputes during the political crisis in Venezuela this year, and eventually ICANN drew a line in the sand and approved the applications.
After rejecting an appeal from Colombia in September, ICANN quietly published Amazon’s proposed PICs (pdf) for public comment.
Only four comments were received during the month-long consultation.
As a personal aside, I’d been assured by ICANN several months ago that there would be a public announcement when the PICs were published, which I even promised you I would blog about.
There was no such announcement, so I feel like a bit of a gullible prick right now. It’s my own stupid fault for taking this on trust and not manually checking the .amazon application periodically for updates — I fucked up, so I apologize.
PICs commenters, including a former GAC vice-chair, also noticed this lack of transparency.
ACTO itself commented:

The proposed PIC does not attend to the Amazon Countries public policy interests and concerns. Besides not being the result of a mutually acceptable solution dully endorsed by our countries, it fails to adequately safeguard the Amazon cultural and natural heritage against the the risks of monopolization of a TLD inextricably associated with a geographic region and its populations.

Its comments were backed up, in pretty much identical language, by the Brazilian government and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Under the Amazon PICs, ACTO and its eight members each get a .amazon domain that they can use for their own web sites.
But these domains must either match the local ccTLD or “the names of indigenous peoples’ groups, and national symbols of the countries in the Amazonia region, and the specific terms OTCA, culture, heritage, forest, river, and rainforest, in English, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish”.
The ACTO nations also get to permanently block 1,500 domains that have the aforementioned cultural significance to the region.
The ACTO and Brazilian commenters don’t think this goes far enough.
But it’s what they’ve been given, so they’re stuck with it.

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