Amazon Purchases .buy TLD For $4.6 Million
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onproton writes: Amazon outbid Google at the ICANN auction this week for the top-level domain .buy , to which it now has exclusive rights, paying around $4.6 million for the privilege. Google was also reportedly outbid for the .tech domain, which went for around $6.7 million. No word yet on Amazon's plans for the new domain suffix, but it's probably safe to say amazonsucks.buy will be added to Amazon's collection of reserved anti-Amazon URLs.
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ICANN should really get ready for a dispute resolution session from buy.com...
Re:i.buy (Score:4, Funny)
Re: i.buy (Score:4, Insightful)
Selling entire TLDs to companies is as stupidly shortsighted as giving large IPv4 blocks to companies in the early days of the internet.
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Selling entire TLDs to companies..
Companies like ICANN?
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Exactly. We really need to replace DNS with something that is distributed. Something closer to bitcoin.
Ideally there would be a way to register a new domain and then all the nodes come to an agreement and
after that point if there is a dispute then all the nodes can vote on who owns that domain. Something
outside the control of any one organization or country where noone had the ability to DDOS a dns
provider, make a website go dark by confiscating its domain, etc...
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Heh. At first glance, I misread the title as "Amazon Products buy .TLD For $4.6 Million" and then quickly realised my mistake--but now I think ICANN should sell the .tld TLD to me. :)
Re:i.buy (Score:5, Funny)
"Bye bye buy.buy." -Buy
I'm sure Google will get .borg (Score:2, Funny)
and there really needs to be only one address in the TLD, am I right, guys?
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Let's try this [unimatrix1.borg]. Getting an entire unimatrix is like getting an entire class A IP6 network. Completely pointless. Which is why we have just stuck with unimatrix 1.
--Bill Gates
Why register amazonsucks.buy if its exclusive? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, if they have exclusive rights to .buy that means no one else is allowed to register amazonsucks.buy. So that wouldn't make any sense for them to register it at all.
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"BUY" seems to be a generic term to me.
http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/a... [icann.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... [wikipedia.org]
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It's the Ed Wood film festival of tech news websites, yes. Thus its charm.
Re: Why register amazonsucks.buy if its exclusive? (Score:2)
Uhm... can I block this? (Score:4, Interesting)
This makes no sense other than being a money grab... Amazon can now charge Barnes and Noble for bn.buy, or redirect it back to Amazon. It seems .buy will just be a redirect to some page on Amazon, or be something trademark owners must buy in order to protect. Remember .cc resulted in refunds from Clear Channel.
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"Amazon can now charge Barnes and Noble for bn.buy, or redirect it back to Amazon"
That nice, but no-one is going to type in bn.buy to get to Barnes and Noble. Only tech savvy people would bother typing a url into the url-bar. Most other people will type barnes into the google search box and hit down and enter.
If Amazon where to register or redirect urls with barnes to the amazon website, they would have a trademark lawsuit on their hands.
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I don't buy your argument.
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When's the last time you guessed at a domain name and ended it with anything other than .com, .org or the relevant country tld?
Big companies use .com nothing has changed.
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The new TLDs are designed so that somebody can block all porn by blocking ".xxx" and block all shopping with ".buy"... but in order for this scheme to work, they have to disable .com too.
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It's the reason Clear Channel was able to promote that Coca-Cola already registered its trademark list during the .cc campaign. If Coca-Cola didn't, Pepsi would have had a shot at registering it. .buy shouldn't exist for the same reason. Everybody knows how to find .com... .buy needs something else like a better way to secure credit card numbers in order to be worth anything more than trademark problem avoidance.
Re: Bestbuy is a dying company (Score:3)
People just look at domains at BestBuy, then purchase them from Amazon.
Million? (Score:2)
ICANN sell to the highest bidder (Score:4, Interesting)
Wikipedia states:
This auction is a blatant contradiction of these principles. An auction does promote a narrow sort of competition, technically, but anyone who didn't have millions of dollars to spare had no opportunity to participate. Now that Amazon has won, the competition is over, and the global Internet community can go broadly fuck themselves.
We should expect much better from the non-profit organization in charge of the world's domain names.
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Now that Amazon has won, the competition is over, and the global Internet community can go broadly fuck themselves.
Yeah, because it isn't like anyone can go get a domain name in some other TLD and still have a viable and active web presence or anything. It's over. The Internet belongs to Jeff Bezos. Film at 11.
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Really? You don't think selling out an entire TLD is a little wonky?
No, I don't. It's not like there is only one and Amazon got it. There are a large number already and more will be created in the future.
but isn't this a little odd when ICANN could just create any number of bullshit TLD's and auction them off for huge profits to companies while everyone else has no chance?
So what if you can't get a domain in the .buy TLD? Big deal. The only issue would be where the money goes, not that Amazon got a TLD of its own. Who makes a profit from ICANN domain sales?
If you can't see that, then I worry about you.
Yeah, if I'm not all doom and gloom about one TLD, that didn't exist yesterday so already had no registrations, not allowing you to register a name tomorrow, it must be my problem and
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You're completely missing the point.
Why should ICANN get to have a free money machine, and what do they intend to spend it on?
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You're completely missing the point. Why should ICANN get to have a free money machine, and what do they intend to spend it on?
Maybe that's why I said the following in what you replied to?
The issue seemed to be that Amazon was getting a TLD and ending competition and nobody else had any chance anymore. That's what the people I replied to complained about. Not the "free money machine".
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We should expect more from people who post on slashdot ... sadly, its silly to have expectations.
TLDs have certain requirements associated with them, unless Amazon magically also has some super special secret deal that Google hasn't told the world about after losing ... then Amazon won't be able to monopolize or otherwise use the TLD to an unfair advantage.
They can set certain things related to how the TLD operates, but they don't get it all to themselves. They didn't buy a TLD for themselves, they bought
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I hope you are right! I haven't seen that stated anywhere else.
If you are right, then you should really complain about the original submission, which states that Amazon "now has exclusive rights" to the domain and that there is "no word yet on Amazon's plans for the new domain suffix." That certainly reads like they're getting it all to themselves.
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And yet that's exactly what Amazon will do. Even if they run their registry business as a separate department, the conflict of interests is always there. It's exactly like an ISP who also provides content has an incentive to make connections to Netf
Time to dissolve ICANN? (Score:2)
How much of this nonsense are we going to let them get away with?
One of the few points of centralisation on the Internet, and sure enough, they're screwing us.
How one would go about killing ICANN, I don't know...
Sounds like no-one has faith in these new TLDs (Score:3)
Google was also reportedly outbid for the .tech domain, which went for around $6.7 million.
Outbid at a paltry $6.7m? Sounds to me like Google had zero real interest.
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Perhaps they realised that most of them will be close to worthless and mainly serve to make blocking particular companies easier.
Rumor has it (Score:1)
Amazon discovered it was for sale when they visited "buy.buy".
Odd investment (Score:2)
I seriously doubt there are millions to make from a TLD. This is an odd investment.
The smart guys are the one that managed to sell a TLD at that price. Who wins the money paid for new TLD auctions, BTW?
com (Score:1)
I wonder how much they would sell the .com TLD for? Hmmm.
TLDs (Score:2)
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Google won the search wars because it ignored what content providers thought should be top of the listings (but let them buy ads), and put what search USERS should be top of the listings. That's how it got where it is and why it's stayed where it is. That's why there are entire businesses based around trying to get your site to the top of Google without getting chucked off their listings - because it's not as easy as just asking, or paying, or tricking Google.
Hence, if ".buy" suddenly starts getting to to
Greatest price war ever (Score:4, Funny)
Wait until they auction off the .sucks TLD!
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Yep. Coca-Cola.sucks controlled by Pepsi, Pepsi.sucks controlled by Coca-Cola... what could go wrong?
Well, that was pointless (Score:2)
The idiocy of new TLDs is revealed for what it is: a way for ICANN to make money. None of this makes things better for website owners or consumers.
Anti Amazon blacklist (Score:1)
No it won't be added to that list, because Amazon now controls this TLD. It controls what kind of domains appear there. It may not even open this to others.