THE BOOK DOMAIN BELONGS TO AMAZON—“.book” DOES, AT LEAST

Many in the book world—including the Authors Guild—expressed disbelief when it was announced in March 2013 that Amazon and other private companies (including Google, as it turns out) were angling to purchase the Internet domain name “.book,” among other generic domain names. That dismay was substantiated yesterday when it became official that Amazon won “.book” at auction—for a cool $10 million, according to reports.

The auction was hosted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which manages domain names—those letters that come at the end of a web address, such as “.com” or “.org.” We have long objected to ICANN’s decision to auction generic Internet domain names to the highest bidder. As former Guild President Scott Turow stated in a March 2013 open letter to ICANN, “Placing such generic domains in private hands is plainly anticompetitive, allowing already dominant, well-capitalized companies to expand and entrench their market power.”

In addition to remaining concerned about ICANN’s auctioning of generic domain names, the Authors Guild is dismayed that Amazon won the auction. “The ‘.book’ domain should not be owned by a for-profit company that is in a position to use it for its competitive advantage,” said the Guild’s Executive Director, Mary Rasenberger, “much less by Amazon, which we believe is already a monopolistic force in the publishing marketplace.”