Amazon joining GlobalBlock

Amazon Registry is planning to join the GlobalBlock trademark-blocking system, judging by ICANN records.

The company has filed a Registry Services Evaluation Process request asking for 33 of its gTLDs to be able to offer a “Label Blocking Service”.

That’s usually code for GlobalBlock, the GoDaddy-led service that allows trademark owners to block their marks across hundreds of TLDs, pseudo-TLDs and blockchain naming systems.

Indeed, the Amazon RSEP is pretty much a copy-paste of the usual documentation registries file when they’re gearing up to join GlobalBlock.

Adding Amazon’s portfolio would bring GlobalBlock’s coverage up to 813 extensions.

Some of the gTLDs Amazon wants to add are not actually live and on sale yet, which could lead to a weird and rather cheeky situation where the company is selling blocks but not domains in certain gTLDs.

Amazon readies .pay gTLD

Amazon’s gradual trickle of gTLD releases nlooks set to continue this year, with the company publishing plans for .pay this week.

But it appears that the space will be strictly controlled at first, with general availability not coming until well into 2027.

Amazon’s planning to take .pay to its obligatory 30-day sunrise period, where only registered trademark holders may register names, from April 13, according to ICANN documentation.

From May 13, the company is planning a Limited Registration Period, during which eligibility is restricted to those “that conduct payment transactions online using an approved Payment Service Provider or Third-Party Payment Processor.”

Registrants will have to use their domains “in connection with payment-related services, including but not limited to processing payments, facilitating e-commerce transactions, or providing payment gateway services” or risk suspension.

General availability is not expected until February next year.

DNS issue at Amazon takes out major apps and sites

Amazon’s AWS cloud platform has been suffering major outages for the last few hours, taking huge chunks of the internet with it, and DNS resolution is being blamed.

Affected products and services reportedly include Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Delta Air Lines, Duolingo, Signal, Reddit, Amazon’s own Ring doorbell cam service, as well as the UK tax authority and various UK banks.

Amazon first reported problems on its status page at 0711 UTC this morning. By 0901 UTC, the company had narrowed the problem down, saying it “appears to be related to DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1.”

DynamoDB is a cloud-based database service Amazon offers on AWS. US-EAST-1 is an Amazon regional data center cluster.

Twenty minutes later, Amazon began to report “early signs of recovery for some impacted AWS Services”. Not long after, it said the recovery signs were “significant”.

At 1035 UTC Amazon said: “The underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now. Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution.”

AWS underpins hundreds of top-level domains — notably, Identity Digital built its registry platform there — but there’s no word yet on any DNS or EPP issues from any registries.

Amazon delays book and fashion gTLDs

Two gTLD launches pencilled in for next month seem to have been delayed a year.

Amazon Registry has filed updated launch dates for two Japanese-language TLDs: .書籍 (.xn--rovu88b), meaning “book”, and .ファッション (.xn--bck1b9a5dre4c), meaning “fashion”.

Both had been previously scheduled to go to general availability in early November, but new dates published by ICANN have pushed both back to the same dates in 2026.

Both have already completed their mandatory sunrise periods, back in late 2016. If they do go GA next year, it will have been a full decade between trademark protection and free-for-all.

Amazon has been slowly releasing its long-dormant stockpile of gTLDs recently. Three — .you, .talk and .fast — went GA earlier this month. Three others — .free, .hot and .spot — launched in the first half of the year.

love.you sold in apparent five-figure deal

The domain name love.you has been sold by Amazon Registry for what was probably more than $30,000, during what so far has been a bit of a disappointing launch for the .you gTLD.

love.you is the only domain currently showing up in .you’s zone file that has a creation date after 1300 UTC on September 25, the moment Amazon opened its latest Early Access Periods.

It was registered about half an hour after the EAP opened last Thursday.

The first-day EAP application fee was $10,000. If love.you was listed as a top-tier premium domain, which seems likely, that would have added an extra $20,000 to the sale price, and that’s before registrar 101domain applied its retail markup.

It’s the only EAP registration in .you so far, judging by the zone. Amazon is currently also running EAPs for .talk and .fast, but zone files suggest it hasn’t made any sales in those gTLDs yet.

The three TLDs are having unusually long EAPs — 11 days versus the usual five — with wholesale prices ranging from $10,000 on day one to $100 on day 11, before premium fees are applied.

Full general availability at standard pricing will begin October 6, with prices likely to be about $20 to $30 a year.

So who’s registering sunrise domains these days?

Amazon went into sunrise with three gTLDs this week, and I thought it might be interesting to pore over the latest zone files to see which companies are the most motivated to protect their brands nowadays.

First, because sometimes the results are just weird. Second, because countless new gTLD consultants are trawling the business world for prospects right now, and sunrise participation data might be useful as lead generation.

Amazon launched .you, .talk and .fast on Tuesday, so these results are for the first two days of sunrise, a period that lasts for a month. As such, there are only a few dozen registered domains in each TLD, at most.

Let’s start with the weird: dog food companies seem to fear cybersquatting more than you might imagine. Mars brands Orijen, Champion Pet Foods and Acana are all protected (though no more of Mars’ dozens of consumer brands), as is independent retailer PetSmart.

An AI company have a presence on the list, which is a relatively new phenomenon for sunrise periods. Anthropic has registered both “anthropic” and “claude”, for its chatbot, in all three TLDs.

Financial companies have a strong presence on the lists, with Freddie Mac, Bank of America, Intesa Sanpaolo, Merrill and Astorg all registering names. Energy brands Iberdrola and Avangrid are registered.

Conscious Capital, a Swiss investment company that doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, has defended its brand. That’s notable because the company uses a .us domain for its web site and the .com is listed for sale by a domainer for $2 million.

1-800-Flowers.com, which has somehow managed to get a Trademark Clearinghouse listing for “flowers” — the product it sells — participated in the sunrises as usual. The gTLD .flowers belongs to XYZ.com.

Hotel chain Hilton, podcasters Wondery, construction company VINCI Concessions (vinci-concessions.you???) and tech firms Broadcom and AT&T have all also got in quick to grab their matching domains.

The sunrise periods run until September 25, with general availability following hot on their heels.

GoDaddy loses last Amazon business to Identity Digital

GoDaddy appears to have lost the last remnants of its Amazon back-end registry services deal.

IANA records show that GoDaddy was recently replaced by Identity Digital as the technical contact for all of the remaining 12 gTLDs it was serving.

The gTLDs in question are: .coupon, .song, .zero and the IDNs .ストア, .セール, .家電, .クラウド, .食品, .ファッション, .書籍, .ポイント and .通販, which are generic terms for things like “fashion” and “books”.

Five of the IDNs have actually launched and have been generally available for years, but they’re been phenomenally unsuccessful — the largest zone has just 146 domains in it. The remaining seven are dormant, unlaunched.

Amazon originally used GoDaddy (then Neustar) for all 54 of the gTLDs it successfully applied for back in the 2012 gTLD application round, but it switched all but 12 of them to Nominet back in 2019, where they remain today.

Third Amazon gTLD launch dates revealed

Amazon is set to launch not two but at least three of its dormant new gTLDs in the next few months, according to ICANN documentation.

As reported earlier this week, .talk and .fast are set to go to sunrise in August and general availability in September, and now they’ll be joined by a third: .you.

.you will enter a one-month sunrise period for trademark owners August 25, to be immediately followed by GA. There’ll likely also be a five-day Early Access Period.

The releases follow the launch of .free, .hot and .spot last month.

Launch dates for two more Amazon gTLDs revealed

Fresh from the launch of .free, .hot and .spot, Amazon has pencilled in launch dates for two more of its backlog of dormant gTLDs.

The company has told ICANN it plans to launch .talk and .fast later this year, with sunrise coming in August.

It also seems to be planning to start using .audible, one of its dot-brands, but that would not be available for public registration.

.fast and .talk are set to enter their sunrise periods from August 26 to September 25 this year, according to ICANN documentation. General availability would follow immediately.

If Amazon follows the same playbook as it did with the three gTLDs it launched last month, there would also be a five-day Early Access Period, with premium prices for early adopters.

The May launches have yet to set the world alight, perhaps in part due to their pricing (ranging from $30 to $60 retail), with best-performer .free’s zone file containing just 1,150 domains so far.

Some people paid premiums for .hot domain hacks

Amazon Registry’s launch of three gTLDs last week saw some registrants pay premium prices for .hot domain hacks.

Zone file data shows domains such as moons.hot and slings.hot were registered towards to the end of the five-day Early Access Period, with the registrant likely paying close to a thousand bucks for each.

cums.hot, longs.hot, moneys.hot, mugs.hot, pots.hot and ups.hot have all been registered, seeming by a broad range of registrants, at regular general availability prices since EAP closed May 17.

The EAP was lightly subscribed, if the zones are a guide. There were a handful of defensive registrations towards the end of the week, along with a few context-appropriate keywords like piping.hot.

.hot launched at the same time as .free and .spot, which don’t seem to have the same domain hack opportunities. Most EAP regs there were either defensives or keywords. Names like speak.free and live.free were registered.

As of today, .free is doing the best of the three, with 931 names in its zone, followed by .spot with 373 and .hot with 309.