
Amazon Loses Bid For .Amazon Domain - nilmonibasak
http://marketingland.com/amazon-loses-bid-amazon-domain-84315
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Igglyboo
Good? These new top level domains are ridiculous, imagine talking to some less
tech savy person about one of these

"Hey, check out my amazon shop at coolstuff dot amazon"

"coolstuff dot amazon dot com?"

"No coolstuff dot amazon"

"huh?"

Com stands for commercial, amazon shouldn't need their own domain to sell
stuff.

EDIT: commercial, not commerce

~~~
deelowe
"Come over to my house, the address is 2245 Azure Bluff."

"You mean 2245 Azure St."

"No 2245 Azure Bluff"

I don't see a different here. There's nothing special about .com. Plus, it's
not going to scale anyways. Why not have arbitrary TLDs? There's no technical
reason why this is an issue.

~~~
JoshTriplett
The difference is that most cities won't have both Azure Street and Azure
Bluff, and if you address mail to 2245 Azure Street, it'll probably arrive at
2245 Azure Bluff.

~~~
drdaeman
No idea about most cities, but my city (Veliky Novgorod, a relatively small
town in Russia with mere 200K population and 90 km.sq. in size) has _lots_ of
such cases. Voskresenskii lane and Voskresenskii boulevard; Orlovsakya street,
Orlovskii lane and Orvovskii passage and so on - all are distinct addresses,
some located in very different parts of the city.

Out of 300 ways extracted from address database I see about 40 entries
(counted by hand, too lazy to build a proper query) being very alike. Luckily,
most names decline and "street" and, say, "boulevard" have different
grammatical gender, so it's harder to make a mistake.

~~~
zimpenfish
Round Greenwich way, we have Vanbrugh Park, Vanbrugh Park Road, and Vanbrugh
Park Road West all within about 400yds.

Why yes, Mr Vanbrugh[1] did live in the castle on the corner...

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vanbrugh](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vanbrugh)

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verelo
Having worked in the domain industry, and closely with many of the individuals
currently bidding on these new tld's (and in some cases have already won
./something/) I can say this is just a land grab. No one has any idea what to
do with .nike, .coke or .whatever, they're just after them because they dont
want someone else to get them.

~~~
pkfrank
I've been out of the "domain game" for a while, but aren't all of these TM-
holders basically allowed to "claim" their names during the "Sunrise" period?
That seems quite the opposite of a land grab: opening up early to avoid
speculators snapping up copyrighted terms.

~~~
verelo
Unfortunatly the trademark rights are not extended to TLD's so this is a bit
of an exception. That does apply to domains in general however.

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Pxtl
The more I think about it, the more I think that non-country TLDs were a
mistake. Each country getting their own TLD to manage as they see fit was a
good idea... but everything else? It was pointless taxonomy. com/org/net/etc?
Who gives a crap? At this point the TLD system is nothing but a way to drum up
more registration fees by registering more and more domains per-business.

Of course, the fact that domains are backwards (subdomain _first_ instead of
_last_ ) is a bigger problem for obvious security reasons.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
More domains per business, but also a sidestep around domain squatters locking
up .com addresses - it seems like half the sites I see linked from HN are .io
for presumably this reason.

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ForHackernews
I hope they give .amazon to those South American nations. They can then
license the name to Amazon for a billion dollars a year.

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fiatjaf
The fact that these TLDs are being given to companies based on their
size/lobby effort/money -- or even that TLDs are being given to anyone by any
criteria -- should be sufficient to make all tech savvy people migrate to
alternative DNS schemes, such as GNS or Namecoin. C'mon, this is not only
ridiculous, it is hugely seriously dangerous.

~~~
zokier
> people migrate to alternative DNS schemes, such as GNS or Namecoin

"GNS" does not find anything relevant on first page of google results.

Namecoin would hardly be an improvement over current system, on the contrary a
system where anyone can snatch any domain without any kind of mechanism for
dispute seems like a step backwards. Especially when there is no top-level
division of the namespace.

~~~
fiatjaf
GNS is the GNU Name System: [https://gnunet.org/gns](https://gnunet.org/gns)

It is a kind of P2P petname system, but better.

I don't like Namecoin also, I was just saying that people should try
alternatives, invent some, if Namecoin is not good for them. I like the GNS
approach very much, but we should be thinking about implementation and/or
alternatives.

~~~
zokier
GNU Name System seems interesting indeed. If I'm understanding it correctly
you could mix'n'match centralized and decentralized stuff with it, eg you
could delegate .com.gnu to VeriSign. But of course there is the little
stumbling block that bootstrapping FoF/WoT style network is nearly impossible.

Actually I wonder if they could have used existing PGP key network as a basis
for building their own system, eg do initial key exchange based on PGP keys.

~~~
fiatjaf
Well, as I understand it, it is projected to work inside GNUnet, so, if they
manage to get GNUnet, a highly challenging and multipurpose protocol (both to
install yourself and much more to convince your friends to install) to be
accepted by the public, the FoF network will be the easiest part.

I'm not into this existing PGP key network. What exactly do you mean by it?
The key servers all around the world? Are there some apps/services that use
this network for something? I always thought these servers were just sitting
on piles of public keys and that nobody ever even looked at them.

This is pretty interesting. Where should I look at to get more information on
this topic?

~~~
zokier
> much more to convince your friends to install

That is indeed the difficulty I referred to.

> I'm not into this existing PGP key network. What exactly do you mean by it?
> The key servers all around the world?

Keyservers are a small part of PGP WoT. The real magic is in the way keys are
signed. I'm not going to try to explain how it works, there are many good
writeups already on the net. You can start by reading the wikipedia article:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust)

The simplest way GNS could use PGP would be storing PGP public key => signed
zkey mappings in the DHT, so that you could look up users zkey based on their
PGP key. It is bit suboptimal because it still requires users to have separate
keys, but I think it would be better than nothing.

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pragmaticalien8
Trillion $ changes hands on .COM domains, billions were lost on the .COM
collapse, no other tld has this much $ spent on it. It is ingrained into
people's consciousness. Who ever tells you otherwise is selling you a bridge.

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Grue3
Maybe they should apply for .amazoncom

Their main page could be www.amazoncom

~~~
zokier
oh, i got the bestest idea:

    
    
        .amazon·com
    

I can't imagine anyone being confused about that.

