ICANN plays tough over Amazon dot-brands

ICANN has given Amazon and the governments of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization less than a month to sort out their long-running dispute over the .amazon gTLD.
The organization’s board of directors voted on Sunday to give ACTO and the e-commerce leviathan until April 7 to get their shit together or risk not getting what they want.
But both parties are going to have to come to an agreement without ICANN’s help, with the board noting that it “does not think that any further facilitation efforts by ICANN org will be fruitful”.
Attempts by ICANN to meet with ACTO over the last several months have been agreed to and then cancelled by ACTO on at least two separate occasions.
The eight ACTO governments think the string “Amazon” more rightfully belongs to them, due to it being the English name for the rain forest region they share.
Amazon the company has promised to safeguard culturally sensitive terms in .amazon, to assist with future efforts to secure .amazonas or similar for the Amazonian peoples, and to donate services and devices to the nations concerned.
Now, the two parties are going to have to bilaterally decide whether this deal is enough, whether it should be sweetened or rejected outright.
If they can’t come to a deal by ICANN’s deadline (which could be extended if Amazon and ACTO both ask for more time), ICANN will base its decision on whether to approve .amazon based on how Amazon unilaterally proposes to address ACTO’s concerns.
While a rejection of the .amazon application is still on the table, my read is that this is a bigger win for Amazon than it is for ACTO.

Updated: More .amazon delay as governments cancel talks

The future of Amazon’s bid for .amazon has been cast into more doubt after South American governments cancelled talks with ICANN.
The new secretary general of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, Alexandra Moreira, wrote to ICANN CEO Göran Marby February 13 to call off a meeting that had been planned to take place in Brasilia, February 19.
She blamed unspecified “unavoidable circumstances” for the cancellation, but insisted it was unrelated to the .amazon issue.
“It is necessary to clarify that the above mentioned circumstances have no connection whatsoever with neither the substance nor the agenda of the postponed meeting,” she wrote.
I believe the cancellation is related to the ongoing political instability in ACTO member Venezuela, which has recently spilled onto its borders with fellow members Brazil and Colombia.
Moreira reiterated that ACTO remains committed to talks to get the .amazon impasse resolved.
The cancellation of the February 19 meeting causes timing issues for ICANN’s board of directors, which has promised to vote on the .amazon applications at its meetings in Kobe, Japan, at ICANN 64, which kicks off in less than two weeks.
Brazilian Governmental Advisory Committee representative Achilles Zaluar has meanwhile reached out to Marby to request a delay of this decision until ICANN 65, which takes place in June.
Eight-nation ACTO is unhappy with Amazon’s encroachment onto what it sees as its geographic name rights, even though the Amazon region is typically known as Amazonia locally.
Amazon has offered to protect culturally sensitive terms at the second level and to support future efforts to secure a .amazonia TLD.
But its latest offers have still not been formally presented to and discussed with ACTO.
This post was updated an hour after publication to provide additional context to the cancellation.

After ICANN knockback, Amazon countries agree to .amazon talks

Talks that could lead to Amazon finally getting its long-sought .amazon gTLD are back on, after a dispute between ICANN and eight South American governments.
The Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization last week invited ICANN CEO Goran Marby to meet ACTO members in Brasilia, any day next week.
It’s not clear whether Amazon representatives have also been invited.
The outreach came despite, or possibly because of, ICANN’s recent rejection of an ACTO demand that the .amazon gTLD applications be returned to their old “Will Not Proceed” status.
In rejecting ACTO’s Request for Reconsideration, ICANN’s board of directors had stressed that putting .amazon back in the evaluation stream was necessary in order to negotiate contractual concessions that would benefit ACTO.
Amazon is said to have agreed to some Public Interest Commitments that ACTO would be able to enforce via ICANN’s PIC Dispute Resolution Process.
The e-commerce giant is also known to have offered ACTO cultural safeguards and financial sweeteners.
ACTO’s decision to return to the negotiating table may have been made politically less uncomfortable due to a recent change in its leadership.
Secretary-general Jacqueline Mendoza, who had held the pen on a series of hard-line letters to Marby, was in January replaced by Bolivian politician Alexandra Moreira after her three-year term naturally came to an end.
ICANN’s board has said it will look at .amazon again at its meetings in Kobe, Japan, in March.

ICANN puts deadline on .amazon talks

ICANN’s board of directors has voted to put a March deadline on talks over the future of the .amazon gTLD.
Late last week, the board formally resolved to “make a decision” on .amazon at ICANN 64, which runs in Kobe, Japan from March 9 to March 14.
It would only do so if Amazon the e-commerce giant and the eight governments of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization fail to come to a “mutually agreed solution” on their differences before then.
CEO Goran Marby is instructed to facilitate these talks.
Here are the relevant resolved clauses from the resolution:

Resolved (2019.01.16.03), the Board hereby reiterates that Resolution 2018.10.25.18 was taken with the clear intention to grant the President and CEO the authority to progress the facilitation process between the ACTO member states and the Amazon corporation with the goal of helping the involved parties reach a mutually agreed solution, but in the event they are unable to do so, the Board will make a decision at ICANN 64 on the next steps regarding the potential delegation of .AMAZON and related top-level domains.
Resolved (2019.01.16.04), the Board encourages a high level of communication between the President and CEO and the relevant stakeholders, including the representatives of the Amazonian countries and the Amazon corporation, between now and ICANN 64, and directs the President and CEO to provide the Board with updates on the facilitation process in anticipation of revisiting the status of the .AMAZON applications at its meeting at ICANN64.

The vote came following ACTO’s demand that ICANN reverse its decision to take .amazon, and Chinese and Japanese translations, off their “Will Not Proceed” status, which heavily implied they will ultimately end up in the root.
ACTO, which claims its members have a greater right to the string due to its geographical and cultural significance, says it has not yet agreed to Amazon’s peace offering, which includes safeguards, financial support for future gTLD applications, and free Kindles.
The ICANN board has now formally rejected the demand — so .amazon is still officially on the path to delegation — but has published mountains of clarification explaining that ACTO misinterpreted what the status change implied.
The board now says that the status change was necessary in order for ICANN to negotiate the inclusion of Public Interest Commitments — PICs, which would give ACTO the right to challenge Amazon if it breaches any of its cultural safeguards — in the .amazon contracts.
With ACTO’s Request for Reconsideration now dealt with, the ball moves into ACTO’s court.
Will ACTO come back to the negotiating table, or will it retain the hard line it has been adopting for the last few months? We’ll find out before long.

.amazon domain isn’t a slam dunk after all

Amazon’s application for the .amazon dot-brand may not be as secure as it was thought, following an ICANN decision over the Christmas period.
Directors threw out a South American government demand for it to un-approve the .amazon bid, but clarified that ICANN has not yet made a “final decision” to allow the gTLD to go live.
The Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee formally rejected (pdf) a Request for Reconsideration filed by the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, which is made up of the governments of the eight countries near that big foresty, rivery, basiny thing, on December 21.
ACTO had asked the board to overturn its October resolution that took .amazon off its longstanding “Will Not Proceed” (ie, rejected) status and put it back on the path to delegation.
Secretary general Jacqueline Mendoza last month blasted ICANN for multiple “untrue, misleading, unfortunate and biased statements”, in connection with ACTO’s purported acquiescence to the .amazon bid.
Refusing ACTO’s request, the BAMC stated that ACTO had misinterpreted the resolution, and that ICANN did not intend to delegate .amazon until Amazon the company and ACTO had sat down to talk about how they can amicably share the name.
The October resolution “could have been clearer”, the BAMC said, adding:

the Resolution was passed with the intention that further discussions among the parties take place before the Board takes a final decision on the potential delegation of .AMAZON and related top-level domains. The language of the Resolution itself does not approve delegation of .AMAZON or support any particular solution. Rather, the Resolution simply “directs the President and CEO, or his designee(s), to remove the ‘Will Not Proceed’ status and resume processing of the .AMAZON applications.”

There are pages and pages of this kind of clarification. The committee clearly wants to help to smooth over relations between ICANN and the governments.
On the face of it, there’s a slight whiff of ret-conny spin about the BAMC recommendations.
There’s some ambiguity in the public record about what the ICANN board actually voted for in October.
Shortly before the ICANN board voted to resume processing .amazon, CEO Goran Marby stated, in front of an audience at ICANN 63 in Barcelona, both that a decision to delegate was being made and that ACTO was still at the table:

what we in practice has done is, through facilitation process, constructed a shared delegation of .AMAZON where the company has or will provide commitments to the ACTO countries how the .AMAZON will be used in the future. And the decision today is to delegate it, forward it to me to finalize those discussions between the company and those countries.
And I’m also formally saying yes to the invitation to go to Brazil from the ACTO countries to their — finish off the last round of discussions.

While the new clarifications seem to suggest that ACTO still has some power to keep .amazon out of the root, the BAMC decision also suggests that the full board could go ahead and approve .amazon at the ICANN 64 meeting in Japan this March, with or without governmental cooperation, saying:

the BAMC recommends that the Board reiterates that the Resolution was taken with the clear intention to grant the President and CEO the authority to progress the facilitation process between the ACTO member states and the Amazon corporation with the goal of helping the involved parties reach a mutually agreed solution, but in the event they are unable to do so the Board will make a decision on the next steps at ICANN 64 regarding the potential delegation of .AMAZON and related top-level domains. The BAMC encourages a high level of communication between the President and CEO and the relevant stakeholders, including the representatives of the Amazonian countries and the Amazon corporation, between now and ICANN 64.

If you’ve not been following the story, ACTO has concerns about .amazon due to its similarity to the name of the rain-forest region.
Amazon the company has promised to encode cultural safeguards in its ICANN contract and offered to donate a bunch of free stuff to the countries to sweeten the deal
The current Amazon offer has not been published.
The BAMC recommendation will now be considered by the full ICANN board, which is usually just a formality.