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“We own your name” government tells Amazon in explosive slapdown

Kevin Murphy, October 29, 2017, 21:43:52 (UTC), Domain Policy

Amazon suffered a blistering attack from South American governments over its controversial .amazon gTLD applications this weekend.
A Peruvian official today excoriated Amazon’s latest peace offering, telling the tech giant in no uncertain terms that the word “Amazon” is not its property and demanding an apology for the company’s alleged behavior during recent legal proceedings.
“We will be giving you permission to use a certain word, not the other way around,” she said. “We are the owners of the Amazonian region.”
Speaking for almost 10 minutes during a session at the ICANN 60 meeting in Abu Dhabi this afternoon, Peru’s representative to the Governmental Advisory Committee pulled rank and scolded Amazon like a naughty schoolchild.
She claimed that Amazon had been bad-mouthing Peru by saying former GAC reps had “lied to and manipulated” the rest of the GAC in order to get support for its objection. She then demanded an apology from the company for this.
She was speaking in support of the idea that the string “Amazon” belongs to the people of the Amazonas region, which covers as many as eight South American countries, rather than the American company, despite the fact that none of those countries use the English word to describe the region.
Her remarks drew applause from parts of the audience.
Amazon had showed up at the session — described by two GAC reps later as a “lion’s den” — to offer a “strong, agreed-upon compromise that addresses the needs of the governments”.
The proposed deal would see the GAC drop its objections to .amazon in exchange for certain safeguards.
Amazon is promising to reserve geographically and culturally sensitive words at the second level in .amazon.
The domain rainforest.amazon, its associate general counsel Dana Northcott said by way of example, would be never be used by anyone.
Affected governments would get to negotiate a list of such terms before .amazon went live and there’d be an ongoing consultation process for more such terms to be protected in future.
The company has also promised not to object to — and in fact to actively support with hard resources — any future applications for .amazonas or other local-language variants by the people of the region.
But Peru was not impressed, telling the company that not only is the English version of the name of the region not its property but also that it must show more respect to governments.
“No government is going to accept any impositions from you,” she said, before appealing to fellow GAC members that the issue represents a kind of existential threat.
“The core issue here… is our survival as governments in this pseudo-multi-stakeholder space that has been invented,” she said.
“They want us to believe this is a place where we have dignity but that is increasingly obvious that this is not the case,” she said. “We don’t have it. And that is because of companies like yours… Companies that persist in not respecting the governments and the people they represent.”
The Peruvian GAC rep, listed on the GAC web site as María Milagros Castañon Seoane but addressed only as “Peru” during the session, spoke in Spanish; I’ve been quoting the live interpretation provided by ICANN.
Her remarks, in my opinion, were at least partially an attempt to strengthen her side’s negotiating hand after an Independent Review Process panel this July spanked ICANN for giving too much deference to GAC advice.
The IRP panel decided that ICANN had killed the .amazon applications — in breach of its bylaws — due to a GAC objection that appeared on the face of the public record to be based on little more than governmental whim.
The panel essentially highlighted a clash between ICANN’s bylaws commitments to fairness and transparency and the fact that its New gTLD Applicant Guidebook rules gave the GAC a veto over any application for any reason with no obligation to explain itself.
It told ICANN to reopen the applications for consideration and “make an objective and independent judgment regarding whether there are, in fact, well-founded, merits-based public policy reasons for denying Amazon’s applications”.
That was back in July. Earlier today, the ICANN board of directors in response to the IRP passed a resolution calling for the GAC to explain itself before ICANN 61 in March next year, resolving in part:

Resolved (2017.10.29.02), the Board asks the GAC if it has: (i) any information to provide to the Board as it relates to the “merits-based public policy reasons,” regarding the GAC’s advice that the Amazon applications should not proceed; or (ii) any other new or additional information to provide to the Board regarding the GAC’s advice that the Amazon applications should not proceed.

Other governments speaking today expressed doubt about whether the IRP ruling should have any jurisdiction over such GAC advice.
“It is not for any panelist to decided what is public policy, it is for the governments to decide,” Iran’s Kavouss Arasteh said.
During a later session today the GAC, talking among itself, made little progress in deciding how to formally respond to the ICANN board’s resolution.
A session between the GAC and the ICANN board on Tuesday is expected to be the next time the issue raises its increasingly ugly head.

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Comments (5)

  1. Ryan says:
    October 29, 2017 at 9:54 pm

    Just give them $1B if you want it.

    Reply
  2. Albert says:
    October 29, 2017 at 11:50 pm

    Who cares. Move on, Bezos. It’s for the better. The gtld game is over and done. They were all dead on arrival and no one wants them.

    Reply
    • Kevin Murphy says:
      October 29, 2017 at 11:56 pm

      He does.

      Reply
      • Rubens Kuhl says:
        October 30, 2017 at 12:31 am

        They could have tried handling it better, though… “The Amazon is ours” is a motto being repeated in Brazil since decades ago, and by forgetting context, they associated themselves with US imperialism. Context is for kings, war is for generals; having generals choose a path forward usually leads to war.

        Reply
    • JayP says:
      October 30, 2017 at 11:47 am

      Keep preaching that bullsh it all you want but the numbers don’t lie. Take .club for instance: not counting the regs, which are in the millions. .club has a total of 373 sales to date. Only 3 of those sales were under $X,xxx usd. The new “gtld game” is what now Al?? By all means stay in your fantasy world if you want but ignorance is only bliss to the fool.

      Reply

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