Amazon An Early Winner In ICANN gTLD Rollout

Amazon looks set to bag itself at least a few personalised domain names, as the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced the first tranche of companies to pass initial evaluation of the big gTLD rollout.

Most of the winners in this first batch were bidding for gTLDs with Chinese characters, including three of Amazon’s applications. It is still hoping to win many more, but is facing stern opposition for a number of them. Barnes & Noble and a number of publishers are opposing .book, .read and .author, whilst numerous South American governments are against the .amazon domain.

ICANN results

Other winners in the first batch include Wal-Mart, VeriSign and the League of Arab States. ICANN is publishing evaluation results in increments of 30 per week and plans to increase that to 100.

Those that pass the initial evaluation could have their hands on their gTLDs by 23 April.

“Applicants, along with the greater ICANN community have dedicated countless hours toward reaching this goal,” ICANN said.

“This is not only an important and exciting moment in the New gTLD Program but also in the continuing evolution of the Internet.”

Some see the process as potentially damaging for the Internet, warning of  land grabs from Internet giants such as Amazon and Google, which applied for a whopping 101 gTLDs.

Others believe ICANN is in it for the money – the application alone costs  £185,000 and there is a $25,000 yearly charge for the winners.

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