Two publishing industry groups, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, are objecting to the online retailer’s request for ownership of new top-level domain names. They argue that giving Amazon control over such addresses—which include “.book,” “.author” and “.read”—would be a threat to competition and shouldn’t be allowed.
“Placing such generic domains in private hands is plainly anticompetitive,” wrote Scott Turow, well-known author. But I believe that his opinion is misplaced as all top-level domains are in private hands. He clearly does not understand how the internet works.
It would also appear that the Author’s Guild and Association of American Publishers are also clueless on the workings of URL addresses. Of course, all this really does is make .com all the more valuable. In my opinion, the value of all these new gTLDs is close to worthless.
There are two ways to find a web site: direct navigation or search. As to search, the gTLD has little value when it comes to GOOGLE rankings, or even BING or YAHOO. The Search engines rank URLS on various criteria, the very least of which is the gTLD.
As to direct navigation, what are the odds of a user typing in Nonfiction.book as opposed to nonfictionbooks.com? The public is so well indoctrinated to use .com, that any other gTLD has little chance of succeeding without massive amounts of money being used to advertise some other gTLD. As to .author or .read; acquiring these top-level domains is throwing money down the drain.
Thanks for “listening”
Howard
The Neu Facebook
