After a week of meetings in Durban, South Africa, focused on vanity domain names, it looks like Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) application to use its own name is still being denied, while U.S. apparel chains Express (NYSE:EXPR) and The Limited won't be able to block other applicants from grabbing their names. But one of the vanity-domain decision makers also acknowledged this week that all these cases may yet end up in court.
The quarterly meeting of ICANN, which is selling new top-level domains (what comes after the last dot in a web address) for $186,000 each, did result in the first four vanity domains being officially awarded, but none were for retailers or in the English language. At least some of the new names sought by U.S. chains should be awarded by the end of the summer, ICANN says. But what initially looked like just a very expensive way to acquire their own .brand names is now turning into a process that's effectively stripping some chains of their brands.