Good luck calling your next venture Amazon then.
What this shows is that Amazon now effectively owns the word Amazon, stripping countries where the largest river in the world flows, of the rightful use of the term.
It absolutely does not. Nobody is going to stop calling the Amazon Rainforest or the Amazon River the Amazon. Nobody is going to prevent the countries who have the Amazon within their borders from promoting the Amazon abroad. The only thing that changes is, well, nothing. Because the countries involved clearly had no intention to apply for the .amazon gTLD until AMZN did. So they lose nothing.
https://icis.corp.delaware.gov/Ecorp/EntitySearch/NameSearch...
But it's not stupid that individuals who've thrived economically beyond reason can now own almost anything and we keep making excuses to allow them to?
There's the problem. The name exists, so somebody owns it.
Who has more right to it? The countries with a big river with that name running through it, or the ecommerce startup from really not that long ago?
No individual entity -- person, place or corporation -- needs a TLD. They're TLDs, they're for giant collections of people, places and things.
But once ICANN says, "Hey, would you like to buy <.YOURCOMPANY>? It'd be a shame if someone else did.", most any company is going to say, "Goddammit, fine", and then once you've spent the money on it, you might as well start using it, with store.YOURCOMPANY and about.YOURCOMPANY and mail.YOURCOMPANY, and now the conventions of hierarchical domains and the very notion of URLs is meaningless.
I do blame all of us webdevs for getting cutesy with with making the TLD part of your company/domain name.
Subdomains off barclays.co.uk are also not great, because cookies can be shared up to the domain level (intentionally or accidentally), and you don't want any risk of your potentially less secure marketing websites being compromised through CRSF or something and leaking access to sensitive login cookies on the actual bank's website.
So the best solution here really is to get and use the .barclays TLD. That way, there's no possible cookie/session-sharing security exploits since every website is truly a different domain, and only Barclays itself can register .barclays domains so customers can have trust when they see a .barclays domain that it is actually the bank they're dealing with. Additionally, there's fun security things you can do at the TLD level, like globally applying HSTS preloading, that Barclays isn't doing (but should be) and that we are.
And as for open TLDs, the existing generic namespaces like .com are heavily mined out and it's very expensive to acquire a decent domain name in them. So having all these other alternatives available now makes it much easier to get a decent domain for a reasonable cost, which is good for users (and bad for domainers, who I have no sympathy for). For example, I managed to pick up cyde.dev at the base registration cost, which I'll be putting some real content on at some point in the future. I think that's a pretty darn good, short, domain-specific domain name, and much better than anything I could've gotten on .com. cyde.com, by contrast, was registered way back in 2002, 4 years before I ended up going with my second choice of cydeweys.com. But I like cyde.dev better, so I'll be migrating stuff over to it.
Full disclosure, I run .dev (but not .barclays!).
It's interesting how you count organizational complexity, incompetence and (minor) technological shortcomings as a reason to create a whole new TLD.
It's convenient for the brand, but not a good reason to pollute the global namespace, especially as it sets the expectation that every organization worth something should have one.
> the existing generic namespaces like .com are heavily mined out
True, and the proper solution is to clear some up. The name authorities need some shaking up. Squatting should be made illegal/against terms and actually prosecuted/applied. Registering domains by 100s or even 100'000s you should not get discounts - you should get unaffordable price hikes. On ccTLDs maybe people could get a few free domains and then have to pay for everything extra?
This is a case for a better structured web, not for giving up meaningful hierarchies altogether. It shouldn't be possible to register a .co.uk domain unless you are a company that is registered in the UK and can be sued. Ideally companies also shouldn't be allowed to use TLD not designated for them so barclays.awesome etc. is suspicious. A namespace like .bank.uk would be even more secure.
> Subdomains off barclays.co.uk are also not great, because cookies can be shared up to the domain level (intentionally or accidentally),
There is no reason we can't treat barclays.co.uk like a top level domain for some purposes, using a mechanism like the public suffix list.
> But I like cyde.dev better, so I'll be migrating stuff over to it.
So the new TLDs encourage people to migrate, thus changing URLs and frequently breaking them by not bothering with redirects.
Just checked google for a word earlier this morning that was free and balked at how stupid this TLD land grab is, unless you own or manage one.
The 'nobody needs' standard? That is what and how we think of things? Does anyone 'need' beer or football or 100,000 other things?
In a market system if you have money and if you have made money you can use that money to do things and buy things. It's not up to someone else (you, me or comments on HN) to determine that what we want to buy that we can legitimately buy is 'needed' or not.
Football is of ZERO interest or need to me. But I do recognize that others get pleasure from watching it.
> They're TLDs, they're for giant collections of people, places and things.
According to who exactly?
"The domain system is a tree-structured global name space that has a few top level domains… While the initial domain name "ARPA" arises from the history of the development of this system and environment, in the future most of the top level names will be very general categories like "government", "education", or "commercial". The motivation is to provide an organization name that is free of undesirable semantics."
The DNS is an obvious natural monopoly.
I would say it's either no one or everyone — I personally wouldn't mind if we could all get a tld and link that to a personal public IPv6 range and simple enough software to administer it. I think we should all be entitled to get that over internet, it belongs to all of us as a system.
ICANNs rent seeking scheme sucks, but beyond the rent seeking this is hardly a big deal.
But I think the point they raised is still very good.
>ACTO insisted on a face-to-face meeting and Marby duly got on a plane to Brasilia. He was in his hotel room in Brazil’s capital when he was told the meeting had been cancelled due to the political situation in Venezuela.
In the end the ACTO folks didn’t even care enough to meet with the ICANN CEO who had traveled all the way to Brasilia to meet them.
I can’t buy the Venezuela excuse, surely the ACTO gtld experts are not the same people who deal with Venezuela.
It was the foreign minister of Brazil who canceled the meeting, citing the tensions with Venezuela as the reason for cancelation. [0]
[0] https://veja.abril.com.br/blog/radar/chanceler-cancela-reuni...
Not even close to being true. I have actually dealt with the US Government and have gotten explicit permission from them for something very similar. Official letter from the appropriate agency 'not restricted by anything feel free to use'.
> Just another example of how unjust and unequal in general the administration of domain names is.
Typical internet furor over what you read that others say who are not properly informed about a topic.
Nothing 'unjust' the process took years and years not exactly a back room deal.
- a joint steering committee (ACTO and Amazon) for .amazon, giving ACTO countries the right to veto domains;
- delegation of second-level domains to ACTO countries;
- commitment from Amazon not to register domains that have significance to the region.
I haven't seen any news that suggest they were trying to extract money out of Amazon. It was Amazon that was flaunting money at ACTO.
[0] https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/zaluar-..., http://www.itamaraty.gov.br/pt-BR/notas-a-imprensa/20312-sol...
A pretty stupid argument if you ask me.
I loathe to defend Amazon and ICANN of all the fucking things, but come on now. There are plenty of reasons to shit on these two, but not this nonsense. 'Illegal', lmao.
In this case though it seems like the most common use for a .amazon domain would be to scam Amazon customers. Tourism could easily go under a .com. That'd be a good reason to assign it to Amazon. It'd be in the interests of people regardless of the company.
Can we not trademark English words, since we aren't English?
The fact that they sold the TLD to the the company is a little sketchy, but the idea that South America has an inherent trademark on anything "Amazon" is ridiculous.
Also, most of the outrage I'm aware of over the commercial use of California by non-Americans is because some people name things "California" and then don't sell them in the US.
https://www.adventure-journal.com/2019/08/its-absurd-the-new...
Whether or not you agree with their decision, this whole saga fails to inspire confidence in their processes and long-term neutrality.
A particularly concerning quote:
"Those PICs were published months later but ICANN went out of its way to make sure they weren’t noticed: it published them on a sub-site that requires people to register to access information, instead of using its normal public comment process, and it made no public announcement about the publication, despite promising to do so."
"But the plans were on display..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a torch."
"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice, didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard."
It’s not like Spain has a .es and a .sp or the US has a .us and the .eu tld.
If Amazon the company didn’t exist or it was called “the warehouse” these countries would give a rat’s ass about the .amazon gtld.
On the one hand, I get that domains and TLDs are important aspects of branding, people care about making sure terms are tied to the most salient endpoints.
On the other hand... isn't this whole system a bit like some guy in a basement writing a list of words next to various numbers? Then we all just decided to tell our machines to listen to that guy?
It feels weird to me to be angry at the phone book I chose to use.
And if all popular indexing methods are subject to public debate, we end up in strange places.
We might single out ICANN as special, more important, but given how many people go through search to land on websites, rather than typing domains directly, in some ways ICANN is just pushing one index in a crowded field. In some ways Google is more ICANN than ICANN. Google's top level results for amazon (and java and cheddar etc.) aren't places.
If we don't really like how some guy maps symbols to symbols, maybe we should just make your own map that we do like better? If it is better, promote it, maybe it catches on. Namecoin and Tor basically do this, though they're limited to certain use cases. Some alternate DNS resolvers block/re-map known malicious sites. ICANN isn't forcing us to care about any of its decisions.
I don't know, I have enormous uncertainty here, and "hey just abandon a core feature of the internet" is definitely too glib given how unsure I am about all this.
But still, it's just an arbitrarily filled map. It feels really weird to me to be angry at a random lookup table. Maybe just walk away from it instead.
EDIT: larkeith's top level comment also ends up at ICANN replacement, with far more sympathy and less bewilderment along the way, I respect that a lot.
EDIT 2: Brevity. Still failed but trying.
Most of the time it seems like the things people are angry about, politically, involve who gets to be the gatekeeper for things. That seems to me more or less equivalent to who gets to own and maintain certain lookup tables.
Having control of something like that isn't about the physical book or something you have, it's about the relationships you have with all the people "who matter" that use your lookup table.
I wonder how many of recent efforts on DNS alternatives was motivated by the perspective to profit off of new names gold rush. Some even got VC funding IIRC.
Morocco banned Google Maps after they displayed a border with Western Sahara. Now if one requests a Google map of Morocco from within .ma, they get a version without the border.
No, not like that. The East India Company had independent military power. ICANN does not.
Balkanization would send an important message to ICANN.
https://www.icann.org/resources/agreement/amazon-2019-12-19-...
I would like to actually see the discussions leading to this agreement.
The ideal version of ICANN is to be the "UN of the Internet", but its recent actions make it sustainable that there are too many commercial motives involved.
new gTLDs are out of the bag. I'd say they need some regulation, the thousand percent price increases isn't fair to consumers, but it's hard to put that cat back in the bag and get rid of them. Might need a neglected pool where registry operators simply bid to handle them, you know registration volume and price. They don't get any crazy fees to operate the neglected pool.
It is appealing to view the web like physical land and seeing this as a border dispute but it only goes so far. If the (non-existent, hypothetical) website is discoverable on search engines and the URL is published by the government's it works just as well
That seems to suggest, if that causality is correct, that if Amazon weren't an American company, Brazil wouldn't have had any objection. So it's just a naked attempt to use a private company headquartered in a nation another nation is mad at for political horse trading and ICANN made the right decision.
