I read on a Facebook group, from Barry Shein, an imaginative and IMO effective resolution to the .amazon issue. I offer it here with some personal suggestions added regarding to 'what comes next': Amazon pays for the creation of the ".amazonas" TLD, and entrusts it to a nonprofit whose stakeholders are exclusively from the five countries (Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia) through which the river runs. Such stakeholders could be government, NGO or private. In return, the GAC rescinds its objection to .amazon. (Alternatively, dot-amazonas could be entrusted to the three regional governments -- in Peru, Colombia and Brazil -- that are named "Amazonas".) After all, "Amazonas" is the local name for the river in both Spanish and Portuguese. Since elsewhere governments are turning to local names rather than anglicized ones -- think Beijing, Iqaluit or Bengaluru -- wouldn't this be a Good Thing and a reasonable answer to both the governments and the bookstore? Such an offer would dull most of the logical objection to the bookstore's desire for the name, while calling on the affected countries to actually indicate what they would do with an appropriate TLD, or at least to reserve it for future use. Would such a compromise be workable? Or would it cause a problem by putting the current objectors on the spot regarding what they would do with the TLD themselves? (Perhaps this re-opens a wider problem with geoTLD names, wondering if every possible linguistic name for countries and regions are deserving of protection. I mean, do we need to protect "Schweiz", "Suisse", "Svizzera", "Svizra", "Helvetia" AND "Switzerland"?) - Evan