Barnes and noble wanted one of these domains and sent an appeal to ICANN. They lost the appeal.
Amazon operates these domains within a category of new domain names deemed “closed generics”, which are domain names that companies have successfully bid on or outright paid to get provisioned and own them for their own use and no one else’s. There has been persistent concern raised that this might create unfair monopolies especially for online shopping.
Amazon is the largest holder of closed generic domains on the internet. Nearly all of their domains they own are not able to be purchased and are for Amazon use only. There has been no consequences for this action and it seems unlikely there ever will for the foreseeable future as well.
The French government owns gouv.fr and all their stuff is a subdomain of it. I still don’t understand why the US government doesn’t just do the same, register gov.us and leave everyone alone with their .gov
Why is it that the French government cannot register gov.fr? Here is uk: https://www.gov.uk/
Because we’re French and our word for government is gouvernement.
They absolutely could register gov.fr, but the french word for government is gouvernement, so they would prefer to use a contraction of that instead
There are laws in France that official offerings from the government, employers, etc. always have to be in French. Additional languages may be offered as secondary choices. It makes only sense to extend that to domains, I guess.