Amazon books an epic Web battle

Contrary to Internet myth, “ICANN” is not derived from the ancient Norse word for “asshat,” though you might be forgiven for believing that. It stands for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and it is the source of both great scorn and great amusement, depending on which side of the table you’re on. (Me, I’m under the table, laughing my asshat off.)

For the last few years ICANN has been cooking up a plan to blow the lid off the supply of top-level domains, adding hundreds of new TLDs to the current roster of 22, which already includes domains like .aero, .music, .coop, and a dozen others nobody ever uses. Because of that brainchild, ICANN is in the news again today, thanks to high-profile folks who are balking at Amazon’s attempts to own the yet-to-be-approved .book domain.

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For those of you who haven’t been following the twists and turns of this saga, here’s some background. Last April, ICANN received more than 1,900 applications — and in excess of $350 million in application fees — from 1,100 companies seeking to buy their own little corners of the InterWebs. There were so many applications that ICANN was flummoxed on how to deal with them, so it came up with a variety of increasingly ludicrous schemes. Last December, ICANN settled on a bingo drawing (yes, bingo) to determine the order in which each application was considered. Even if ICANN sticks to its schedule of processing 20 applications a week, it will still take nearly two years to get through all of them.

Among the most aggressive bidders were Google and Amazon, which seek to control dozens of proposed new domains like .app, .cloud, .author, .play, and .book.

Amazon vs. the literary world

Not surprisingly, much of the book-loving public — including competitors like Barnes & Noble, publishers, and book authors — doesn’t relish a world where Amazon owns every domain that ends in .book or .author. Authors Guild president and perennial best-seller Scott Turow wrote a letter to ICANN last week claiming that Amazon’s virtual land grab offers a limitless potential for abuse.

For Turow, at least, Amazon is not presumed innocent (ba dum bum).

In ICANN’s defense, there are a few reasonable arguments for expanding the current pool of domains. First, the Net has long needed TLDs for international organizations where English is not the primary language. This is why the first 100 or so domains in consideration are in Kanji, Cyrillic, Arabic, and other non-Latin alphabets.

Second, it’s getting increasingly hard to find a dot-com address that hasn’t been registered yet by someone — usually a domain squatter, though addresses in the other 21 current TLDs are still relatively plentiful. In theory, at least, the new TLDs would create a virtually infinite new pool of common Internet addresses.

The fix is in

Of course, there are other reasons for foisting hundreds of new domains onto a world that’s barely aware of any besides .com, .org, and .edu. One is to create massive new revenue streams for domain registrars. Their executives, not coincidentally, fill many of the seats on various ICANN committees.

Take the proposed TLD .sucks, for example. According to its original application, the idea behind .sucks is to create “a focal point for customer service” — essentially, to establish a place where unhappy customers can complain, far from the madding crowds on Facebook and Twitter. It doesn’t take an evil genius to figure out how a registrar could extract a handsome ransom from deep-pocketed companies who feel compelled to buy that Internet address just to keep others from using it, as they do with the .xxx domains.

If you were Starbucks, how much would you be willing to pay to own Starbucks.sucks? As much as it takes. That’s a lotta lattes.

The company that first proposed the TLD .sucks is a domain registrar called Vox Populi, which is itself wholly owned by Canadian registrar Momentous. The CEO of Vox Populi, John Berard, sits on ICANN’s Business Constituency committee. See how this works?

Now it’s up to ICANN to decide whether individual entities like Amazon should be allowed exclusive control over generic domains like .book. ICANN also gets to decide which of the 13 companies vying over .app or the seven companies seeking .cloud win the day, as well as whether the proposed TLD .unicom is too similar to .unicorn. Think of the confusion among “Harry Potter” fans alone.

ICANN’s new CEO Fadi Chehade (say it out loud) has promised new TLDs will begin rolling out by April 23, so the real circus is about to start. Grab some peanuts and cracker jacks, it ought to be an entertaining show.

Will ICANN ever get it right? Should Amazon be allowed to own .book, etc? Post your thoughts below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Amazon books an epic Web battle,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.