Amazon has won the right to create domain names ending in .Pay, according to domain-tracking newsletter The Domains.
The E-commerce giant, which applied for the .Pay top-level domain (TLD) rights in 2012, became the last bidder standing after Swiss company DotPay SA dropped out just days before .Pay was scheduled to be auctioned off. That means Amazon can proceed through a now-mostly-bureaucratic process of officially being assigned rights to the TLD, including signing a contract that requires the .Pay domains to go live within a year.
Other payment-related TLDs that are already in the contracting stage are .Alipay (which was won by Alibaba’s payment service) and .PayU (won by Dutch online-payments company PayU). However, no one spent $185,000 to apply for the .Payment name by the time domain-name overseer ICANN stopped taking applications in 2012.
Amazon originally applied for a total of 76 different TLDs in 2012, all of which it intended to restrict to use by Amazon and its subsidiaries. But after several years of objections and comments submitted to ICANN, it appears that Amazon will eventually be selling .Pay domain names — although initially the company has said it will be launching only a limited number of names. (It didn’t say whether one of them will be amazon.pay.)
Even after the new domain names go live, most analysts expect domain names ending in .Com will continue to represent the overwhelming majority of websites and Internet services.