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Comment by travisoneill1 | Hacker News Reader

This is stupid. These countries have no right to this TLD just because the forest of that name is located there. If they had wanted it they should have applied for it first. It is equally as stupid as saying that Jeff Bezos can't use the name "Amazon" because it is owned by the owners of the Amazon rainforest, or saying that Brazil can't name its rainforest "Amazon" because that is a Greek mythological term and, therefore, owned by Greece. Nobody owns the word "Amazon"

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> Nobody owns the word "Amazon"

Good luck calling your next venture Amazon then.

What this shows is that Amazon now effectively owns the word Amazon, stripping countries where the largest river in the world flows, of the rightful use of the term.

I'm also guessing those countries don't speak English and "Amazon" is localized as something else.

I'm sure Amazon the company protects its trademark well.

Wouldn't need good luck. Do a search for "Amazon" here and you will see why not:

https://icis.corp.delaware.gov/Ecorp/EntitySearch/NameSearch...

I'm not sure why you think global naming rights issue forth from the second smallest state in the United States of America.

The point of the GP is that there are many companies called "Amazon" or some variation thereof, registered in Delaware alone. Clearly AMZN does not own the word "Amazon".

It's a bit disturbing that all major search engines show results for the company Apple before the fruit apple. Not even talking about ads. A search for "apple" comes up with a tech company, not the food. Seems a bit perverse especially for searches performed by those too young to have known a time when apple the fruit had a stronger association with the name than Apple the corporation.

This is a major problem with search today. It's not however a problem with the size or power of Apple. It can just as well happen with some random thing that nobody is politically concerned with.

In general, when I search for something that could be ambiguous (and everything is) I want a sample of each possible cluster or meaning. But today, Google (and others follow their lead) is determined to give you the answer, and also certain that nobody reads beyond the first few hits. It's not helpful to say "give right results and not wrong ones" because a fanatical devotion to that "idea" is what got us into a dysfunctional situation.

Why should a search engine decide which of these is more important rather than what the user is more likely searching form?

If it makes you feel any better, [apples] is still predominantly about the fruit.

(I mean, ads still show the computer, but I'm assuming no one is doing brand-building ads online for the fruit.)

I believe search engines are in the business of showing what people want to see, not making decisions for us. (Insert remarks about google here)

99% of the time when I search "apple", I do, in fact, want searches related to the company. Now that I think about it, I've never searched for apple (as in the fruit) casually.

It's really silly for you to be offended by something as objective as the PageRank algorithm, which is essentially how search results are ranked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

> What this shows is that Amazon now effectively owns the word Amazon, stripping countries where the largest river in the world flows, of the rightful use of the term.

It absolutely does not. Nobody is going to stop calling the Amazon Rainforest or the Amazon River the Amazon. Nobody is going to prevent the countries who have the Amazon within their borders from promoting the Amazon abroad. The only thing that changes is, well, nothing. Because the countries involved clearly had no intention to apply for the .amazon gTLD until AMZN did. So they lose nothing.

> This is stupid. These countries have no right to this TLD just because the forest of that name is located there.

But it's not stupid that individuals who've thrived economically beyond reason can now own almost anything and we keep making excuses to allow them to?

Greek here, you can expect our lawsuit papers shortly.

If the Greek started suing everyone over words and won, Greece would be a very wealthy nation, moneywise.

Or we would speak as our forefathers have, of stuffkenning and farbkenning and amberkenning. Unclefts and flytrains, not the other words in our wordheap.

We prefer to release our words under a CC-BY license.

> Nobody owns

There's the problem. The name exists, so somebody owns it.

Who has more right to it? The countries with a big river with that name running through it, or the ecommerce startup from really not that long ago?

Apparently, the answer is the highest bidder.

Yay... let's put a price tag on everything! Let "the market" decide. What could we also sell... let's see: Air, water, children... the highest (richest?) bidder decides.

Especially if he got rich by exploiting workers (through low wages and bad working conditions, like wearing diapers) and exploiting state regulations (through tax evasion).

We do sell air and water, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Where do we sell air?

Access to clean, drinkable water is a human right, btw.

Wouldn’t it also be the only bidder in this case? Nobody else ever made an application for the .amazon gtld.

That is a ridiculous statement. My first name is Travis. I am not the owner of https://travis.io/ but somehow we coexist. That's because even though the name clearly exists, no one owns it. But this guy owns the domain because he registered it first. By your logic this would come down to who the oldest person with the name is. It sounds stupid in this context because it is. There is no principal here, just a money grab by some South American countries who had no interest in the domain until someone rich registered it. If it was a matter of principal they would have objected when Bezos registered amazon.com, but he wasn't a billionaire then, so they didn't care.

Well, you don't own .travis though. Nobody complains that Amazon owns amazon.com

Fair point, but a general objection to privately owned TLD's is not what is being argued in this case.

No, but it is being argued that it’s different/more significant than a standard domain.

Why would Amazonian nations care about Amazon.com? It’s a company called amazon on a commercial TLD. They aren’t even commercial entities.

As a TLD it offers a much more broad use.

.amazon is also a commercial TLD if AMZN buys it.

It's a top level domain, not one in the .com namespace.

A top level domain used for commercial purposes is in fact a commercial TLD. It's not the commercial TLD, but it is "a commercial TLD".

This is increasingly less tru as TLD's like .amazon are being given out. There's no reason that a or b in format a.b is more important, other than the fact that the arbitrary convention exists that a can be anything but b can only be one of a few choices.

If no one owns it then scrap the trademarks worldwide before the decision. Companies have insane amount of power over words.

well their claim is better than that of a company

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