Walmart (NYSE:WMT), Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and more than a dozen other retailers who applied for their own top-level domains (TLDs) were expecting to see them rolled out starting this year. But the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is running into more delays in approving the vanity domains, and some—including .amazon—look like they may not be available to retailers at all.
The problem comes down to the fact that anyone can object to a TLD that has special significance beyond being a trademark, and far more objections have been filed over the nearly 2,000 applications for the new TLDs. In .amazon’s case, there’s a South American river with the same name (what a coincidence, huh?)—and several South American countries believe that’s a good reason for Amazon not to get control of .amazon. More