Rod Beckstrom, of CEO ICANN, speaks in Washington, DC, on January 10, 2012. AFP/Getty Images/Saul Loeb
When the Internet Committee for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) revealed it would begin to take applications for new top-level domain suffixes other than the universal “.com,” “.net” or “.org” in 2012, the web went abuzz with speculation as to which brands and organizations would win settlements for some of the most sought-after domain names. “.search,” “.health,” and “.app” were among some of the most-discussed suffixes — but it looks as though “.book” is the first to make a splash public enough to draw heated attention from those in print and online publishing.
Publishers’ rage at Amazon’s application for “.book,” “.read,” and “.author” highlights the potential volatility of ICANN’s decision to dole out hundreds of new internet domain names in an application process for which the nonprofit came under fire. At a fee of $185,000 per application, the group roped in $357 million at the outset of registration, and set about the task of processing nearly 2,000 bids for who gets what domain name. Now ICANN must deal with the angered Association of American Publishers and The Authors Guild. Both groups claim that Amazon’s bid to control those three domain suffixes among others would violate the freedom of the internet, insisting that the awarding of the suffixes to the online retailer would be an “anticompetitive” move on the part of ICANN, although such a claim currently appears to be a bit dramatic and unfounded. Authors Guild president and best-selling legal writer Scott Turow wrote a open letter to ICANN arguing that — should ICANN bestow such domain names on Amazon — the group would be “allowing already dominant, well-capitalized companies to expand and entrench their market power,” insisting that no private organization should be given the power of such web addresses. Yet since this expansion of the internet is the first of its kind, there is as yet no meaningful way to determine how much marketing power a private company would obtain from hosting these new top-level domains.
While the initiative to broaden the internet by giving businesses and brands the ability to host new domain suffixes was launched as a way to better organize the web and to share information, it was always going to be a boxing ring for companies vying for suffixes that suppose the ownership of these IP addresses would fortify their brands. Google and Amazon — two of the biggest gorillas in this fight — have bid for a mutual 23 names, according to reports, so a close eye will be kept to see which wins the more popular suffixes. (DomainPeople is a service that has launched entirely devoted to monitoring the awarding and registering of the new domain names.) Yet Google’s bid comes with a twist, making the search engine appear a bit less greedy: Its March 7 letter to ICANN propounds the benefits of creating a more competitive and innovative internet, with language that describes its intent to revise four of its applications for some of the most sought-after names (“.search,” “.blog,” “.app,” and “.cloud) because they have been identified as “being potentially valuable and useful to industry as a whole.” Surely it is in Google’s best interest to stay in the good graces of the public as well as ICANN, but its suggestion that it would not limit the user experience on its new IP addresses to that of Google products seems unlikely.
The absence of data on how profitable these new top-level domain addresses will be for whatever organizations — public or private — end up hosting them leaves a glaring hole in the viability of complaints coming from groups like The Authors Guild. New analytics technology will be required to monitor the new ways in which companies reach customers through these new IP addresses. Yet such monitoring software will only be able to be implemented on a broad scale when the websites themselves exist. Until the accusing groups here can prove that owning such internet addresses gives the brands in question disproportional advantages over competing brands, their protestations could fall on deaf ears.
