Music lobby pushes for control of Web domain

An independent music lobbying group is pushing to have the music community, not tech companies such as Google and Amazon, take control of the new Internet domain ending .music.

{mosads}In a letter on Wednesday, the American Association of Independent Music — which works with independent record labels and music platforms — said the music industry should decide who gets to run websites that end in .music, instead of the traditional .com.

“The benefits of the music community running [.music] include maximizing the protection of intellectual property and incorporating appropriate enhanced safeguards to prevent copyright infringement, cybersquatting and any other type of malicious abuse,” the group wrote in a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the not-for-profit is responsible for distributing the new domain names.

ICANN has already delegated dozens of new domain endings — including .diet, .college, .dentist and .vodka — while others like .book and .music are being fought over.

In its letter, the independent music group asked ICANN to keep .music out of the hands of Amazon and Google, both of which have applied to run the domain.

“Both of these companies have exhibited a disregard for properly compensating music creators based upon music usage and for not protecting copyrights,” the independent music group said.

The letter pointed to the ways Amazon Prime and Google’s YouTube deal with independent music groups as opposed to major music labels.

“Both have not valued Independent creator’s copyrights on the same equitable basis as larger copyright creators,” the letter said.

Instead of Amazon or Google, ICANN should give the music community a boost as the not-for-profit auctions off the right to run .music, the group said.

“This will ensure that any monies generated through .music will flow to the music creator community not pirates, unlicensed sites, or giant search engines.”