Amazon and Google seek control of .everything

ICANN’s once-in-a-lifetime generic top-level domain (gTLD) sale has been criticised for permitting an "internet land grab" by the moneyed elites of the web.

That may or may not be true. But a perusal of the applications by Amazon, Google, Apple and others at least reveals something of their strat­egic thinking.

Apple seems only to have bid for its own name, .apple, which seems sensible enough.

Amazon, though, seems to want to rule the world. You would expect the company to apply for .Amazon, and naturally enough it has. But the scores of additional applications are revealing.

They include .author, .audible, .book, .buy, .call, .cloud, .game, .imdb, .kindle, .mail, .mobile, .movie, music, .news, .pay, .room, .search, .secure, .shop, .song, .store, .talk, and .video – among many others.

Google was equally greedy, although a bit craftier. It applied under the name of subsidiary company, Charleston Road Registry. In its bid for world domination, it applied for the entire family – .mom (but not .mum), .kid (but not .child) and .dad, as well as .eat (but not .drink) and many of the same gTLDs that Amazon wants.

Of course, that list doesn’t include the 116 applications for internationalised domain names (IDNs), for gTLDs in scripts such as Arabic, Chinese and Cyrillic. Not that people in China or parts of the Middle East would be allowed to look at some of the actual websites, of course.

Still: nice to have on the off-chance.