Latin Americans Near the Actual Amazon May Snag ".Amazon" Over the Retailer’s Protests

Latin American countries that are near the Amazon river might get control of the domain name ".Amazon," over the objections of the world's largest online retailer.

When you think of the word "Amazon," do you think of the river or the website? Amazon.com is betting you think of the website, and wanted to claim ".Amazon" to use as a platform for various web applications. But Latin American countries, who live along the original Amazon (River) have stalled the Seattle-based online retailer from grabbing up the domain, according to the Wall Street Journal.

You've probably never heard of ICANN - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - but the nonprofit organization is pretty powerful. That's because it largely controls what domain names you can type into a web browser at the end of url addresses. The organization is meeting in Durban, South Africa this week to sort out the growing web - and the subsequent need for new domains.

So far, on Tuesday, the Governmental Advisory Committee met and recommended against Amazon.com taking control of the ".Amazon" domain, perhaps because Latin American countries have objected to it. According to Nao Matsukata, of the domain-name advisory firm FairWinds Partners who is attending the conference, the representatives from Latin America "said it would not be fair for Amazon to have control," adding, "It's a shame that this couldn't be a more open process and less arbitrary."

The final nail isn't in the coffin against Amazon owning its own name-sake's web domain, but according to the Wall Street Journal, ICANN has followed the advice of the Governmental Advisory Committee in the past. Amazon said it would still try to nab the domain name, as well as 80 others, like ".kindle" and ".shop."

Meanwhile, the clothing company Patagonia was ruled against by the same committee in its bid for the ".Patagonia" domain name. That domain, of course, is sought after by Argentina, whose Patagonia region is where the clothing company got its name.

The Journal says that hundreds of companies are applying for so-called top-level domain names, hoping to broaden the Internet away from the standard suffixes like ".com" and ".co.uk."

There's a commercial incentive to getting top-level domains, but there's also a practical reason for the expansion, according to another WSJ report - with about 252 million domain names already registered, the good URL names have been taken, leading to new startups having to get very clever and confusing about their companies' names.

URL names are perhaps getting too clever, wacky, and non-descriptive, according to the report. After Yahoo and Google (remember? Those used to be wacky words before they were the overlords of our daily online existence), sites like Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, and Spotify carried on the trend of strange spellings and off beat words. But now, when almost every business has a website, new businesses have to invent words to find a domain that works, without resorting to long, hard-to-remember URLs. Enter the startups Kaggle, Shodogg, Mibblio, and Zaar.ly.

Perhaps getting more URL suffix domains is the right move.