ICANN chief to lead talks over blocked .amazon gTLD
ICANN CEO Goran Marby has been asked to help Amazon come to terms with several South American governments over its controversial bid for the .amazon gTLD.
The organization’s board of directors passed a resolution last week accepting the suggestion, which came from the Governmental Advisory Committee. The board said:
The ICANN Board accepts the GAC advice and has asked the ICANN org President and CEO to facilitate negotiations between the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization’s (ACTO) member states and the Amazon corporation
Governments, prominently Peru and Brazil, have strongly objected to .amazon on the grounds that the “Amazon” river and rain-forest region, known locally as “Amazonas” should be a protected geographic term.
Amazon’s applications for .amazon and two Asian-script translations were rejected a few years ago after the GAC sided with its South American members and filed advice objecting to the gTLDs.
A subsequent Independent Review Process panel last year found that ICANN had given far too much deference to the GAC advice, which came with little to no evidence-based justification.
The panel told ICANN to “promptly” take another look at the applications 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”.
Despite this, the .amazon application is still classified as “Will Not Proceed” on ICANN’s web site. That’s basically another way of saying “rejected” or “denied”.
Amazon the company has promised to protect key domains, such as “rainforest.amazon”, if it gets to run the gTLDs. Governments would get to help create a list of reserved, sensitive domains.
It’s also promised to actively support any future bids for .amazonas supported by the governments concerned.
.amazon would be a dot-brand, so only Amazon would be able to register names there.
Lorem ipsum
This has already been denied 3 times or more.
How many NO will they need ???
Those countries are milking this for every ounce of political capital they can to appear strong and decisive to their voters.
If anyone it should be Greece with a grounds for objection, since that is where the term originated.
That said, these countries had no issues with allowing Amazon to operate, register trade marks, etc in their jurisdictions, but oprating a TLD is now too much to bear? They are like little children who discover an interest in a toy only when someone else wants to play with it.
Puh-leeeeeeeese!
Amazon should be able to operate .amazon
No, Amazon should not be able to operate .amazon
Money doesn’t buy everything.
The Greek angle is a blind alley. “Amazon” doesn’t even use Greek characters.