Dive Brief:

• Amazon Wednesday won a bid for the .buy domain, which will allow it to gain exclusive access to any domain name with the .buy extension.

• At the auction held by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Amazon beat out Google for the domain and is paying $4.6 billion for the privilege.

• ICANN, a nonprofit organization that among other activities oversees the technical coordination of the Internet’s address system, has said it is introducing more top domains to diversify Internet addresses.

Dive Insight:

Chalk this up as a win for Amazon over rival Google in this round over domain as a new era of Internet addresses comes online. The .buy domain could enable Amazon to seize control of at least some of the parody and anti-Amazon addresses like amazonsucks.buy. Although that will do nothing to stop screwamazon.com, amazonstinks.com, and amazonsucks.com.