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Amazon offered $5 million of free Kindles for .amazon gTLD

Kevin Murphy, October 23, 2018, 10:11:57 (UTC), Domain Policy

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.


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Comments (5)

  1. Michael says:

    Why dont they offer cash?

  2. R P says:

    For a trillion dollar company that’s literally pennies. How insulting.

  3. Richard Funden says:

    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.

  4. Hal O'Brien says:

    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.

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