Amazon's bookish top-level domain hunt irks publishers, Barnes & Noble

Publishers represented by the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers have filed objections to Amazon's pursuit of new generic top-level domains ".book," ".author" and ".read." While some of those gTLDs have already come under fire from entire countries, the influential book groups told gatekeeper ICANN that "placing such generic domains in private hands is plainly anticompetitive," adding that it would allow "already dominant, well-capitalized companies" to abuse their market power. ICANN plans to assign rights to organizations or companies to manage domain suffixes like the current ".com" or ".org" and firms like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have sought names like ".app" and "movie," often in competition with each other. Competitor Barnes & Noble filed its own protest, saying that Amazon "would use control of these TLDs to stifle competition in the bookselling and publishing industries." If such protests are persuasive enough, companies could lose not only the domain name in question, but 20 percent of the $185,000 application fee -- admittedly pocket change for outfits like Amazon.

Filed under: Amazon

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Via: WSJ (subscription)

Source: ICANN (1), ICANN (2)

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/gTf9Sy6h3QQ/

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