Amazon planning to enter the domain name registrar market?

So far, Amazon has maintained a relatively low profile as a registrar and registry, but there are reasons to believe it is about to become a more prominent player in the market.

The e-commerce and web services giant has secured its second ICANN registrar accreditation and appears to be preparing for a new domain-centric website.

The subsidiary Amazon Domain Registrar US LLC obtained accreditation this week, with its official website domain being domains.amazon, registered on November 29. The domain is currently not resolvable from my location.

Amazon has already been using the .brand domain registry.amazon among its 50+ new generic top-level domains (gTLDs), most of which have not yet been launched.

In the registrar market, Amazon's subsidiary Amazon Registrar Inc has been accredited for over a decade and has been accepting registrations since 2015 as part of its Route 53 hosted DNS service.

However, it is not a traditional registrar storefront—registrations appear to be possible only through the management console used by existing Route 53 customers. Nevertheless, it has amassed over 1.3 million gTLD registrations to date.

So, could domains.amazon become the latest entrant in the retail registrar market? Small registrars celebrating Google's exit from the registrar space might soon encounter a new major obstacle.

Source: DOMAIN INCITE