Barnes and noble wanted one of these domains and sent an appeal to ICANN. They lost the appeal.
Amazon operates these domains within a category of new domain names deemed “closed generics”, which are domain names that companies have successfully bid on or outright paid to get provisioned and own them for their own use and no one else’s. There has been persistent concern raised that this might create unfair monopolies especially for online shopping.
Amazon is the largest holder of closed generic domains on the internet. Nearly all of their domains they own are not able to be purchased and are for Amazon use only. There has been no consequences for this action and it seems unlikely there ever will for the foreseeable future as well.
I was so heartbroken when I realized lemmy.read cant be bought. Literature.cafe is cute and all but lemmy read sounds like let me read ;(
they own the thing at the right so you can’t have even wkdnenwooxofkenjd.read? Didn’t know you can own that
It’s a pretty new thing. In recent years many new TLDs have been added.
See here for a full list currently supported on the open web: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
Companies are now allowed to add TLDs to this, if they can provide a reason and the infrastructure needed to make them usable.
Amazon owning those TLDs and not allowing registration for it is not okay in my opinion. The words “book” and “read” are not exclusively used by Amazon.
Here is some insight into the process: https://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/draft-rfp-clean-12nov10-en.pdf
What a bunch of cocks.
Wait a second, cocks provide value to society and many people like them. Don’t denigrate them by comparing them to Amazon
Be sure, prior to buying any book or book-related thing online, to check if that ‘small, independent’-looking website you’re about to click on isn’t a front for Amazon. In the same way record megacorps create ‘fake indie’ labels, Amazon creates fake indie online booksellers, or buys real ones out (for example, Abebooks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbeBooks).
I feel no guilt whatsoever using libgen, internet archive etc. if I cannot find a book from outside the Amazon monolith.
If you want a web front end for actual independent bookstores https://bookshop.org/ is excellent. You’ll likely pay a small premium over Amazon but you will directly support independent bookstores and publishers.
Also just as a PSA, GoodReads is also Amazon owned and I recommend everyone to check out alternatives like BookWyrm (Activity Pub integrated) and StoryGraph.
ICANN is so full of shit.
This should be damning for ICANN. Amazon, any other corporation, or any other person shouldn’t be allowed such a monopoly, but this is all dictated by money.