Domain Name Wire data recovery services to the rescue.
This morning I read Amazon.com’s spirited response to the Governmental Advisory Committee’s advice to kill .amazon.
This afternoon, shortly after Top Level Domain Holdings CEO Antony Van Couvering tweeted about the response, he noticed that the document suddenly disappeared from ICANN’s website.
Indeed, here’s what you’ll see next to .amazon on the GAC advice page:
What happened? It’s hard to say. I didn’t find anything in the response to have potential confidentiality issues.
Alas, whomever deleted it (and it must have been on purpose) did not delete it from the “Download All Response” PDF (thanks Kevin).
Just to be sure though, here’s the missing document (pdf) if you’d like to read it (thanks Jeff).
Amazon’s response was not the only thing to suddenly go missing in the new top level domain world today.
International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR), which is managing string confusion objections, posted an updated listed of decisions.
I started comparing it to my list when I realized there weren’t any new decisions. Instead, one disappeared.
The link to the decision in which Afilias beat Donuts on .pets is gone. The document is still there (if you still have the link from before), but it now shows up as not-yet-decided.
This one is more likely to be a clerical error given the old fashioned way ICDR is managing the “database” of decisions.
Nonetheless, here’s the decision.
Reg-o-rama says
Thanks for hosting these, I know the links used to go back to ICANN, but they took them down.
Jack says
ZING!…..
Notably, neither the objecting countries nor the GAC objected to another gTLD application with a nearly identical fact pattern. Ipiranga Produtos de Petroleo S.A. (“Ipiranga”), the applicant for .IPIRANGA, Appl. No. 1-1047-90306, is a Brazilian private, joint stock company.
Ipiranga is “one of the largest oil distribution companies in Brazil and is the largest private player in the Brazilian fuel distribution market.”37 Ipiranga “holds various trademarks in Brazil to protect its brand. . . . [as well as] various trademarks in South America” and various domain names to protect its brand, such as ipiranga.com.br and ipiranga.net.br. “Ipiranga’s operations also include a successful, promotion-based e-commerce website ipirangashop.com.” Ipiranga states it has invested heavily in brand awareness and has received extensive recognition, including “Second Most Remembered and Preferred Trademark” in the field of oil distribution in Brazil, and “Most Well-Known and Preferred Brand in the field of fuels.”
According to the .IPIRANGA Application, Ipiranga applied for a gTLD to, (1) “secure and protect the Applicant’s key brand” (“IPIRANGA”) as a gTLD; (2) “reflect the IPIRANGA brand at the top level of the DNS’ hierarchy”; (3) provide “stakeholders of the Applicant with a
recognizable and trusted identifier on the Internet”; (4) provide “stakeholders with a secure and safe Internet environment, under the control of the Applicant;” and (5) “use social communities to increase brand awareness and consumer trust.” Ipiranga stated that its .IPIRANGA Application was not a geographic name.
Ipiranga is a district of São Paulo.38 The Ipiranga Brook is a river in the São Paulo state in southeastern Brazil where Dom Pedro I declared independence in 1822, ending 322 years of colonial rule by Portugal over Brazil.39 Indeed, the Ipiranga is so important to Brazilian culture and heritage that it is included in the first stanza of the national anthem.40
Nowhere in the .IPIRANGA Application does Ipiranga state that it obtained approval (or nonobjection) from the Brazilian government for its application.41 Nowhere in the application does Ipiranga state that it will act in any interest but the protection of its rights as a private company. The Brazilian GAC representatives did not issue an Early Warning against the .IPIRANGA Application nor did Ipiranga submit a Public Interest Commitment.42
Notwithstanding the obvious importance of the term “Ipiranga” to Brazil’s heritage, the GAC did not object to the .IPIRANGA Application nor, to Amazon’s knowledge, did the GAC even discuss the .IPIRANGA Application during the GAC sessions in Beijing43 or Durban.
Amazon does not believe the .IPIRANGA Application should be rejected; quite to the contrary. Just like Ipiranga, the oil company, Amazon is a company that has a globally established reputation separate and distinct from a geographic term.44
Amazon does not believe that the Brazilian government is purposefully acting in a discriminatory way towards non-Brazilian companies, but the facts – intentional or not – highlight the discriminatory effect of allowing governments to retroactively decide “winners” and “losers”