Tech press misses Google/Amazon name grab
By
Dave Winer on Friday, June 15, 2012 at 5:52 PM.
 Amazon and Google have made an audacious grab of namespace on the Internet. As far as I can see there's been no mention of this in the tech press.  An example. Google doesn't intend to share .blog and it will only be used to point to Blogger sites. If you have a Tumblr or WordPress blog, you can't have a .blog domain. Here is the public listing of Google's application.
The purpose of the proposed gTLD, .blog, is to provide a dedicated Internet space where Google can continue to innovate on its Blogger offerings. The mission of the proposed gTLD is to provide a dedicated domain space in which users can publish blogs. All registered domains in the .blog gTLD will automatically be delegated to Google DNS servers, which will in turn provide authoritative DNS responses pointing to the Google Blogger service. The mission of the proposed gTLD is to simplify the Blogger user experience. Users will be able to publish content on a unique .blog domain (e.g., myname.blog) which will serve as a short and memorable URL for a particular Blogger account. This mission will enhance consumer choice by providing new availability in the second-level domain space, creating new layers of organization on the Internet, improving the Google user experience, and signaling the kind of content available in the domain.
Amazon plans to do the same with .search. So if you have a search site and it's not Amazon's you can't be part of .search.
Google is going to be exclusive about .cloud.
There are lots more new proposed TLDs like this.
Seems like a huge story to me. A big surprise. Did you think this is how it would work? I sure didn't.
I tweeted this, followed by a pointer to a blog post written by Michele Neylon, all before 8AM Eastern this morning. It's now 6PM, and there have been no reports about it in the tech press. It'll be interesting to see when (or if) this becomes a story.
Another angle on this, the ICANN people must have known about these applications long before they were made public. How could they continue this process, knowing that is how Google and Amazon interpreted the idea of new TLDs?
BTW, this also happened on Wednesday morning when we had a story here, at 8AM, about a fundamental change in the way Twitter works. It used to have a 140-character limit, but that limit was lifted for Twitter's media partners. A press release ran later in the day. That's when the reports started appearing in the tech press. Even though the story was in their Twitter timelines, and here on Scripting News.
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An example. Google doesn't intend to share .blog and it will only be used to point to Blogger sites. If you have a Tumblr or WordPress blog, you can't have a .blog domain. Here is the public listing of Google's application. 
