The ridiculousness currently emanating from ICANN and the NTIA (see these excellent posts from Milton Mueller and Eli Dourado on the issue) over .AMAZON, .PATAGONIA and other “geographic”/commercial TLDs is precisely why ICANN (and, apparently, the NTIA) is a problematic entity as a regulator.
The NTIA’s response to ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee’s (GAC) objection to Amazon’s application for the .AMAZON TLD (along with similar applications from other businesses for other TLDs) is particularly troubling, as Mueller notes:
In other words, the US statement basically says “we think that the GAC is going to do the wrong thing; its most likely course of action has no basis in international law and is contrary to vital policy principles the US is supposed to uphold. But who cares? We are letting everyone know that we will refuse to use the main tool we have that could either stop GAC from doing the wrong thing or provide it with an incentive to moderate its stance.”
Competition/antitrust issues don’t seem to be the focus of this latest chapter in the gTLD story, but it is instructive on this score nonetheless. As Berin Szoka and I wrote in ICLE’s comment to ICANN on gTLDS:
Among the greatest threats to this new “land rush” of innovation is the idea that ICANN should become a competition regulator, deciding whether to approve a TLD application based on its own competition analysis. But ICANN is not a regulator. It is a coordinator. ICANN should exercise its coordinating function by applying the same sort of analysis that it already does in coordinating other applications for TLDs.
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Moreover, the practical difficulties in enforcing different rules for generic TLDs as opposed to brand TLDs likely render any competition pre-clearance mechanism unworkable. ICANN has already determined that .brand TLDs can and should be operated as closed domains for obvious and good reasons. But differentiating between, say .amazon the brand and .amazon the generic or .delta the brand and .delta the generic will necessarily result in arbitrary decisions and costly errors.
Of most obvious salience: implicit in the GAC’s recommendation is the notion that somehow Amazon.com is sufficiently different than .AMAZON to deny Amazon’s ownership of the latter. But as Berin and I point out:
While closed gTLDs might seem to some to limit competition, that limitation would occur only within a particular, closed TLD. But it has every potential to be outweighed by the dramatic opening of competition among gTLDs, including, importantly, competition with .com.
In short, the market for TLDs and domain name registrations do not present particular competitive risks, and there is no a priori reason for ICANN to intervene prospectively.
In other words, treating Amazon.com and .AMAZON as different products, in different relevant markets, is a mistake. No doubt Amazon.com would, even if .AMAZON were owned by Amazon, remain for the foreseeable future the more relevant site. If Latin American governments are concerned with cultural and national identity protection, they should (not that I’m recommending this) focus their objections on Amazon.com. But the reality is that Amazon.com doesn’t compromise cultural identity, and neither would Amazon’s ownership of .AMAZON. Rather, the wide availability of new TLDs opens up an enormous range of new competitive TLD and SLD constraints on existing, dominant .COM SLDs, any number of which could be effective in promoting and preserving cultural and national identities.
By the way – Amazonia.com, Amazonbasin.com and Amazonrainforest.com, presumably among many others, look to be unused and probably available for purchase. Perhaps opponents of Amazon’s ownership of .AMAZON should set their sights on those or other SLDs and avoid engaging in the sort of politicking that will ultimately ruin the Internet.