Amazon buys ‘.buy’ for 3.6 million euros

Amazon has deposited $4.6 million, converted 3.6 million euros, for the top-level domain ‘.buy’ in an auction of top-level domain names. ‘.tech’ and ‘.vip’ were also auctioned for several million euros.

Google, among others, had bid for ‘.buy’, but the company was outbid by Amazon, DomainnameWire reports. The ICANN, the organization that coordinates the distribution of domain names and IP addresses, held an auction because there was a lot of interest in the top-level domain names.

The domain names ‘.tech’ and ‘.vip’ were also auctioned. ‘.Tech’ raised 6.7 million dollars, converted to 5.2 million euros, and was sold to registrar Dot Tech, whereby Google was again outbid. Dot Tech’s competitor Top Level Domain Holdings bought ‘.vip’ for 3 million dollars, converted 2.3 million euros. The roll-out of custom TLDs started last year: anyone can now register their own extension for $ 200,000.

The custom-tld program has been criticized a lot. Critics say custom TLDs can cause confusion among users. There would also be security risks, because some domain names that are used internally could suddenly be registered. De Icann has previously admitted that the consequences of the new domain names are unpredictable.