The struggle for a new domain, .AMAZON, that seemed to be coming to a close is heating up again with renewed vigor. As repeatedly reported, Amazon claimed the domain with the intention of using it as a highly restricted dot-brand, but countries in the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) strongly opposed the plan. Endless negotiations between the parties and voting at ICANN's Government Advisory Committee (GAC ICANN) were unsuccessful and ICANN decided to take responsibility for the domain’s fate and delegate it to Amazon on the terms that the company had proposed to South American governments over and over.
Nevertheless, Amazon has run into a new obstacle. Several days ago, the government of Colombia (member of ACTO) filed an official request to reconsider ICANN’s decision to delegate the name. The applicant managed to discover a formal bureaucratic requirement that the corporation start a review procedure. Since . AMAZON is supposed to become a dot-brand, the future registry agreement must include Specification 13 of the ICANN regulations. The clause releases the registry (in this case, Amazon) from registrar competition on the obvious grounds that the registry is the only body that can register all the names in the domain zone. But the agreement reached earlier with South American countries requires that Amazon should designate one domain name to each of the eight ACTO countries: co.amazon for Colombia, .br.amazon for Brazil, and so on. As a result, the registry will not be the only party registering domain names, which violates Specification 13.
This seems, apparently, like pettifoggery. Domain Incite notes that a Colombian victory in the dispute with ICANN would be unprecedented. However, based on the corporation's regulations, the delegation of the domain has been frozen again. ICANN has it until October 28 to reconsider and announce a decision. From the looks of it, ACTO is using the timeout to invent yet another reason to prevent the delegating of .AMAZON.
