Amazon won its appeal against ICANN’s decision. The complaint was reviewed by the International Centre for Dispute Resolution and the panel with two votes against one decided to side with Amazon, reports Domain Incite. Company’s application for a new generic top-level domain (gTLD) .AMAZON was declined three years ago based on unanimous recommendation given by ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC). However, even back then this decision seemed rather odd for many. Obviously, Amazon could be considered a “geographic” name because of the river Amazon. However, the rules of the new gTLD program are very clear. In case the application is made for a “geographic” domain name that corresponds with the name of an administrative region (whether it is a big country or a tiny village), it requires consent of that region. However, no country in South America has a region called Amazon.
Nevertheless, representatives of these countries (primarily – Brazil and Peru) three years ago managed to convince all GAC members to block the application for .AMAZON. The current verdict of the International Centre for Dispute Resolution reads that GAC’s decision back then wasn’t supported by any convincing arguments and GAC itself doesn’t have the right of veto in neither ICANN nor new gTLD program. This is why ICANN’s decision to deny delegation of .AMAZON is subject to revision. The verdict also orders ICANN to compensate Amazon for legal expenses, which amounted to $163,000.
