There are some things that not even Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and the world’s richest man, can easily buy. One of them is the “.amazon” domain name.
Seven years ago, the global body which supervises the addresses and protocols that make the internet work, decided to let web users create new domain names, on top of the existing well-known ones such as “.org” or “.com”. Mr Bezos’s Amazon, which I will call Amazon inc for convenience, tried to grab “.amazon”. But Brazil and Peru protested that this should belong to the far more ancient jungle.
So Amazon inc tried to use the convoluted procedures of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, known as Icann, to press its case. It also sought to appease its Latin American critics by offering gifts of Kindle ereaders and Amazon Web Services reportedly worth $5m. Call this, if you like, the mother of all gift cards.