Amazon is not going to give up fighting for its new gTLD .AMAZON, although its application has been rejected by ICANN. It has not made any official reports on the matter so far, but Domain Incite said it will appeal the decision. Since the launch of the new TLD program, .AMAZON remained a priority target for the global leader in online trading. However, ICANN rejected the company’s application in May 2014.
At the same time, the word “Amazon” is not protected by ICANN’s geographic string rules, as “Amazon” is not the name of a certain region. It is often used in relation to the Amazon River Basin located in the territory of South American countries, including Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. In many countries, there are regions whose names contain the root “Amazon.” Precisely for this reason, however, no states can claim to approve or prohibit the use of .AMAZON, according to ICANN rules. The ban could be imposed only by a unanimous decision of the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC ICANN), which was the case, although the committee’s US representatives hesitated for a long time, not wanting to harm the interests of the major US business.
Amazon, however, has not given up. Over 1.5 years, it has held informal negotiations with representatives of South American countries in the GAC, trying to find an amicable resolution and avoid major expenses on lawyers, which are required by an appeal procedure. Now it is obvious that the negotiations have failed, and the company decided to take the formal legal route.
“During the new gTLD program, the most difficult disputes were those when a TLD was claimed not by companies from the same industry but companies with completely different business. Typically, this occurs when a domain name involves a polysemantic word. Unfortunately, there is no common approach toward resolving such disputes. Each dispute was resolved through lengthy litigation, or one of the claimants abandoned the dispute for some reason. Apparently, the fate of .AMAZON will be determined in the same way,” Andrey Vorobyev, Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/ .РФ, said while commenting on the issue.
