Publishers who are part of the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers have objected to Amazon’s hunt for generic top level domains such as .book, .author and .read. The publishers call this move anticompetitive and Barnes & Noble is one of the most upset parties.
ICANN intends to assign rights to organizations or companies in order to manage suffixes like .com and .org, while giants like Google, Microsoft and Amazon are battling for names that include .app or even .movie. Meanwhile Barnes & Noble is saying that Amazon intends to use control of the TLDs to hurt the competition in the bookselling and publishing biz.
If the protests make it to the right ears, Amazon could stand to lose not only the domain names, but also 20% of the $185k application fee, which is nothing more than pocket change for the company run by Jeff Bezos. Should we see this massive domain purchasing as a sign of the future Amazon products, maybe new tablets?
