Amazon

Type:	Public
Industry:	e-Commerce
Founded:	1995, formerly Cadabra (1994)
Founder(s):	Jeff Bezos
Headquarters:	Washington
Country:	USA
Employees:	33,700 (full-time and part-time)
Revenue:	$34.20B
Website:	amazon.com
Key People
Jeff Bezos, President, CEO, Chairman of the Board Werner Vogels, VP & CTO Mathew Work, VP, Alexa Research Shelley Reynolds, VP Worldwide Controller, Principal Accounting Officer Bill Carr, VP Digital Media Colin Bodell, VP Website Application Platform Jeffrey Wilke, SVP, North American Retail

Amazon.com Inc. is a global leader in e-Commerce and the largest online retail store in the United States and in 45 other countries worldwide offering a wide range of products from books, electronics, games, home and garden, movies, music, toys and many other products.

ICANN & New gTLDs

New gTLD applications

Amazon applied for the following TLDs in ICANN's New gTLD Program: .amazon, .app, .audible, .author, .aws, .book, .bot, .box, .buy, .call, .circle, .cloud, .coupon, .deal, .dev, .drive, .fast, .fire, .free, .game, .got, .group, .hot, .imdb, .jot, .joy, .kids, .kindle, .like, .mail, .map, .mobile, .moi, .movie, .music, .news, .now, .pay, .pin, .play, .prime, .read, .room, .safe, .save, .search, .secure, .shop, .show, .silk, .smile, .song, .spot, .store, .talk, .tunes, .tushu, .video, .wanggou, .wow, .yamaxun, .you, .yun, .zappos, .zero, .亚马逊, .家電, .通販, .食品, .アマゾン, .クラウド, .ストア, .セール, .ファッション, .ポイント, .書籍.

In total, the company submitted 76 applications.

Complaints over Closed Generic TLDs

In September, 2012, an influential consumer advocacy group, Consumer Watchdog, sent a letter to U.S. Sen. Rockefeller, who chaired the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee at the time. Sen. Rockefeller's senate subcommittee had held hearings regarding ICANN and its new gTLD program just before its launch. Consumer Watchdog objected to both Google's and Amazon's plans to acquire generic TLDs and then to restrict them only for their own use. The letter stated in part: "If these applications are granted, large parts of the Internet would be privatized. It is one thing to own a domain associated with your brand, but it is a huge problem to take control of generic strings. Both Google and Amazon are already dominant players on the Internet. Allowing them further control by buying generic domain strings would threaten the free and open Internet that consumers rely upon. Consumer Watchdog urges you to do all that you can to thwart these outrageous efforts and ensure that the Internet continues its vibrant growth while serving the interests of all of its users."

This letter came just a day after a similar appeal by a group of domain industry regulars was announced. Michele Neylon, CEO of Blacknight Internet Solutions Ltd and a highly active member of the ICANN community, led the signatories of a letter addressing the same issue, though it did not name Google nor Amazon by name. Instead it objected to the notion of closed generics as a whole: "generic words used in a generic way belong to all people. It is inherently in the public interest to allow access to generic new gTLDs to the whole of the Internet Community, e.g., .BLOG, .MUSIC, .CLOUD. Allowing everyone to register and use second level domain names of these powerful, generic TLDs is exactly what we envisioned the New gTLD Program would do. In contrast, to allow individual Registry Operators to segregate and close-off common words for which they do not possess intellectual property rights in effect allows them to circumvent nation-states’ entrenched legal processes for obtaining legitimate and recognized trademark protections." Other signatories included: Scott Pinzon, Kelly Hardy, Frédéric Guillemaut, and Robert Birkner.

• More on closed gTLDs

GAC Early Warnings

Amazon was widely recognized as one of the most warned applicants within the GAC Early Warning system. The system does not represent consensus within ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), but instead lets know of one nation's viewpoint that could go on to influence the wider GAC and result in advice to the ICANN Board to not approve a given application. Amazon received 28 warnings, which represents 38% of its portfolio. The vast majority of the complaints came from the Australian GAC representative, and GAC Chair, Heather Dryden, who argues repeatedly that Amazon, nor any other company, should not be given complete control over generic terms on the Internet. Amazon is known for its numerous applications for generic terms that it hopes to restrict to internal registration and its own corporate strategy, such as .music, .blog, etc. It was also warned by governments in South America against its application for its brand name, .amazon, given that the name also represents a prominent region across multiple South American nations.

Background

Jeff Bezos, a young hedge fund analyst, founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore. At first, he planned to call his company Cadabra but he changed his mind because it sounds like “cadaver.” He finally decided to call the company Amazon.com after one of the world’s largest rivers, the Amazon, which represents the gigantic number of books he planned to sell online. Jeff’s parents were the first investors in the company and entrusted him with $300,000 from their retirement savings.

Bezos officially launched the Amazon online bookstore on July 6th, 1995, offering one million titles. The first book that was purchased was "Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought." He used his garage as his working area and warehouse. In 1996, Bezos move to a new headquarters, a small warehouse, and hired 11 people to help him with his operations. He decided to just maintain a small inventory of books in the warehouse and trusted his suppliers to ship every order promptly. The company grew rapidly at the end of 1996. Bezos later decided move to a bigger warehouse in downtown Seattle. During that time, his employees increased from 11 to 151.

In 1997, the company announced the [Initial Public Offering of stocks and started trading on NASDAQ under “AMZN”. The company initially offered 3 million shares at $18 per share and at the end of the trading it closed at $23.25 per share. Amazon sold $54 million worth of stock in one day.

Amazon has expanded into a variety of other industries, including media production. Most notably from an Internet perspective, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a leading provider of web infrastructure and operations.

Acquisitions

1. Internet Movie Data Base (1998)
2. Alexa Internet (1999)
3. Tool Crib of the North Online & Catalog Sales Division (1999)
4. Joyo.com Limited (2004)
5. Book Surge LLC (2005)
6. Custom Flix Labs,Inc. (2005)
7. Shopbop.com (2006)
8. Fabric.com (2008)
9. Abe Books (2008)
10. Zappos.com (2009)
11. BuyVIP.com (2010)
12. LOVEFilm International Limited (2011)

International Operations

Amazon.com Inc.has international operations in six countries and established its software development center in Scotland.

1. United Kingdom- Amazon.co.uk
2. Germany - Amazon.de
3. France - Amazon.fr
4. Japan - Amazon.co.jp
5. Canada - Amazon.ca
6. China - www.joyo.com.cn

Business Alliances

1. Toys "R" Us- A 10 year alliance was created in 2000.
2. Borders Group- In 2001 Amazon took-over the online operations of Borders, the second largest bookseller in the US. The company CEO, Greg Josefowicz believed that Amazon is better at online retail and the partnership will give better service to Borders' online customers.
3. Target- The company signed and e-commerce agreement in 2001
4. National Basketball Association- The partnership was inked in 2003 wherein Amazon will serve as the e-commerce platform for both the men and women's basketball league website.
5. The Bombay Company
6. Diane Von Furstenberg Studio Alliance- In 2005 Amazon announced the DVF studios chose Amazon to create and maintain its websites.
7. Sears Canada, Inc.- signed an e-commerce alliance with Amazon to develop its online brand and business using the tools and technology provided by Amazon.

Other Businesses

Aside from selling products on its online store, the company is also engaged in different businesses such as:

1. selling e-commerce platforms to other retailers
2. providing fulfillment and customer service capabilities to other businesses
3. offering technology infrastructures through a set of web services technologies enabling developers to use the Amazon servers (EC2, S3, SQS)
4. operates its subsidiary search website A9.com
5. runs Alexa.com, a a web search and metrics website
6. manages the internet movie database, IMDb.com
7. runs Endless.com, a shoe and handbag store
8. operates the internet advertising platform, Clickriver.com
9. manages a human task marketplace called Mechanicalturk.com, as well as the question and answer marketplace Askville.com
10. runs the product wiki Amapedia.com

Governmental Advisory Committee. Considers and provides advice on the activities of ICANN as they relate to concerns of governments, particularly matters where there may be an interaction between ICANN's policies and various laws and international agreements or where they may affect public policy issues (ICANN Bylaws).