Should Google and Amazon be allowed to control domains?

Google wants the exclusive right to reserve domains such as .search and .blog for its own use, and Amazon wants to do the same with .music and .cloud. Some critics, including open-web advocate and blogging pioneer Dave Winer, think this is wrong and shouldn’t be allowed. Are they right?

Even something as seemingly innocuous as .cloud could become contentious, especially since both Google and Amazon are vying for exclusive control of the domain — and Google is expected to announce at its upcoming I/O conference that it is launching an Amazon-style cloud service, which it will presumably want to distinguish from that of its competitor. Should ICANN be giving one company or the other the exclusive right to offer companies a .cloud address? And what about .news? Controlling that could theoretically allow Amazon to convey benefits on news entities that play by its rules. Whether ICANN accepts any of the applications from Google and Amazon remains to be seen — but if it does, there will be an even bigger spotlight on what those companies plan to do with them, and whether that is in the interests of the web as a whole.