from Hacker News

South American nations open fire on ICANN for 'illegal' sale of .amazon

by tejado on 1/26/20, 8:41 AM with 184 comments

  • by larkeith on 1/26/20, 11:32 AM

    We badly need a good replacement - ICANN has recently been making it abundantly clear how poor a choice it is to rely on an opaque, unaccountable centralized entity for something as crucial as DNS.

    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."

  • by saalweachter on 1/26/20, 4:12 PM

    I personally blame ICANN more than the corporations here.

    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.

  • by seu on 1/26/20, 9:37 AM

    Of course, if the company would have been called something like "Niagara Falls", or "Yosemite", or "Grand Canyon" and the US government protested, we know the result would have been very different. Just another example of how unjust and unequal in general the administration of domain names is.

  • by neiman on 1/26/20, 9:49 AM

    You can find the agreement here:

    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.

  • by mc32 on 1/26/20, 12:48 PM

    They can still get an “.amazonas” tld.

    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.

  • by brownbat on 1/26/20, 5:05 PM

    I am sheepishly conflicted.

    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.

  • by zaptheimpaler on 1/26/20, 1:51 PM

    This is a tabloid drama story for nerds.. a domain dispute over a hypothetical website jointly owned by multiple countries? That website doesn't even exist and probably was never on the radar until the domain came up.

    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

  • by dextralt on 1/26/20, 1:51 PM

    'Amazon' is an _English_ translation of a _Greek_ name given to an _Eurasian_ tribe. What claim do _South American_ nations have for it?

    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.

  • by rmsaksida on 1/26/20, 12:02 PM

    IMO South American countries should just ban the corporate-owned .amazon from local DNS. The least they can do is boycott the domain.

  • by avsteele on 1/26/20, 2:47 PM

    Sounds like Brazil was the one being unreasonable here. It looks like a shakedown of Amazon. Lest you think of Amazon as a big, powerful, org compared with Brazil, remember that the Brazilian government's budget for 2020 is over $900 billion dollars.

  • by CapacitorSet on 1/26/20, 2:52 PM

    The world is running at full speed towards a dystopia where private companies are more powerful than entire countries.

  • by travisoneill1 on 1/26/20, 10:31 AM

    This is stupid. These countries have no right to this TLD just because the forest of that name is located there. If they had wanted it they should have applied for it first. It is equally as stupid as saying that Jeff Bezos can't use the name "Amazon" because it is owned by the owners of the Amazon rainforest, or saying that Brazil can't name its rainforest "Amazon" because that is a Greek mythological term and, therefore, owned by Greece. Nobody owns the word "Amazon"

  • by zamadatix on 1/26/20, 3:45 PM

    The root problem isn't who should operate individual gTLDs (ICANN always owns it) it's that gTLDs aren't restricted in ways that make it so people aren't worried about who is operating it. In an ideal DNS ACTO would be ecstatic someone else is footing the bill for the gTLD and it's operation not worried about what that means for their right to use it.

  • by shadowgovt on 1/26/20, 6:05 PM

    So Brazil attempted to block the establishment of .amazon because of Snowden revelations that the CIA had wiretapped the president of Brazil's phone?

    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.

  • by Digit-Al on 1/26/20, 10:33 AM

    They should be renamed ICAN'T.