Amazon.Book Wins Bid To Dominate

Amazon may have won big when its bid to own a newly created .book domain was accepted at the private auction organized by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the non-profit organization that governs the Internet naming system.

For a reported $10 million, Amazon can now use .book any way it sees fit.  It can create a whole community of .book.  At the very least, it symbolizes where the publishing industry is at.  Amazon owns .book and the book world.  This merely formalizes what’s happened.

Amazon also owns .buy.  Now you might not see a connection to the two, bet there is a big one.  Amazon wants everyone to buy everything from it.  It wants to own .book and .electronics and .movies and .music and .appliances and all the dots of the world.  Add the dots together.  Amazon wants world domination.

The .book situation will impact searches done on Google and other search engines.  Every time “book” is searched for, .book-related stuff will show up.  Further, unsuspecting consumers will psychologically add more weight to searches that come up with .book.  Look, Amazon didn’t pay ten million bucks for vanity.  They know what they are doing.

Or do they?

Maybe this .book stuff exposes some of the Internet’s shortcomings.  When we search for something, does Google manipulate its searches based on what advertisers pay it, political preferences, or because of any products and services Google offers?

Are sites coming up in search engines due to SEO manipulations?

Are consumers getting confused by the paid for search results coming up side by side with the regular results?

Is the Internet a bastion for illegal activity, piracy, tax evasion, and anonymous attacks on people?

Is the Net good for violating our privacy and hacking into information that could be used against us?

Ok, I digress.  This isn’t about the shortcomings of the digital revolution, but it is about how one company has managed to navigate a new world and soar to the top – despite mounting losses and an inflated stock price.  Amazon continues to be a huge threat to the sustainability of a sound book ecosystem and its purchase of .book is the dot punctuation to its dominance.

Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer, Media Connect, the nation’s largest book promoter. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog © 2014