Louie Baur
Amazon has beat Google to purchase the new .buy top-level domain, paying just under $4.6 million dollars in an auction that saw the two tech titans duke it out for control over a new corner of the internet. Bellevue-based Donuts also participated in the auction. Now, Amazon has to come to an agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that allows Amazon to administer the domain, and then the company will be able to use .buy to further its own products, or potentially sell it to other commerce-conscious folks who want to register websites. It will join the group of other TLDs that the company has been gunning for, including .zappos, .like, and .you.
Amazon has beaten Google in a bid to acquire the .buy top-level domain. ICANN, the international Internet regulator, has awarded (PDF) Amazon the .buy domain after the company successfully outbid three other competitors in an auction. Amazon paid $4.6 million in an auction that ended on Wednesday. Google came in second place through its registry service, Charleston Road Registry. Google lost other auctions on .tech and .vip, as well. Amazon has yet to say what it will do with the .buy domain. CNET has contacted Amazon and Google for comment and will update this story when we have more information. Google has its own registry service, operated by Charles Road Registry, that will allow the company to offer domains in a wide range of top-levels, including .ads, .dad, .eat. In 2012, Google posted a table showing all of the top-level domains that it wanted to offer through its registry service. .Buy was among them. There has been an ongoing gold rush for top-level domains ever since ICANN announced in 2011 that it would expand them outside the scope of the standards such as .com, .org and .gov. Several companies in addition to Apple and Google have been acquiring the domains and see them as possible revenue sources, if the domanins prove applicable to a particular industry or need.
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