Amazon Registry Domains: Who Runs .now, .bot and .deal

Amazon Registry Services, Inc. is the company behind .now, .bot, .deal and a handful of other extensions. It is the registry, not a shop you buy from directly. If you want one of these domains you register it through an accredited registrar, and HostList compares registrar prices for .now on our .now pricing page. Below is who runs what, what each extension is actually for, and whether one is worth registering.

Who owns .now, .bot and the rest of the Amazon extensions?

Amazon Registry Services, Inc. is the IANA-listed sponsoring organisation for .now. The ICANN Registry Agreement for .now was signed on 25 June 2015, and IANA recorded the delegation on 19 May 2016, according to the IANA root zone database entry for .now. Nominet is listed as the technical contact in that record, which tells you the real split of labour: Amazon Registry holds the contract with ICANN and sets policy, Nominet keeps the technical infrastructure running behind the scenes. The registry publishes its own information at registry.amazon, and the old amazonregistry.com address now redirects there.

Registry, registrar, registrant: don't mix these up

These are three different jobs, and confusing them is where most "who owns my domain" questions go wrong. The registry (Amazon Registry Services) operates the extension at a technical and contractual level and decides what gets sold and when. The registrar is the company you actually pay, an ICANN-accredited business that sells names on the registry's behalf; see our full list of registrars and how the different registries that run each extension compare. The registrant is you, or whoever's name sits on the WHOIS record once the domain is registered. If you want to check who currently holds a specific .now or .bot name, run it through our WHOIS lookup tool rather than guessing from the registry's own site, which only tells you about the extension, not individual registrations.

Why did Amazon apply for 76 domain extensions?

In ICANN's 2012 new gTLD round, Amazon submitted 76 applications spanning English, Chinese and Japanese strings, including .amazon, .aws, .kindle, .prime, .book, .bot and .buy, according to ICANNWiki's record of the round. 28 of those applications drew early warnings from ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee. In September 2012, Consumer Watchdog formally objected to Amazon's plan to hold a batch of generic-word strings for its own exclusive use, the "closed generics" argument that dogged several big applicants that year. Worth being clear about what this history does and doesn't explain: many of Amazon's delegated strings simply sat unused for years after they went technically live. That's a fact about the pace of the rollout, not a claim that the 2012 objections caused the delay.

What happened with the .amazon dispute?

Separately from the generic-words argument, the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, representing the countries of the Amazon basin, contested Amazon's application for .amazon itself, on the grounds that the string refers to a place, not just a company. That dispute ran for roughly seven years before the ICANN Board resolved, on 15 May 2019, that processing of the .AMAZON applications should continue, per the ICANN Board resolution. It's a striking footnote to Amazon's domain portfolio, but it concerns .amazon specifically, not .now, .bot or the other retail-facing extensions covered here.

What's actually on sale, and what is each extension for?

The pattern across Amazon's extensions is consistent: strings delegated roughly a decade ago are being released to the public a few at a time, long after they first appeared in the root zone. .bot had a controlled release starting in 2018 and its registration restrictions were loosened in 2023, opening it up more widely. .deal and .now followed a standard three-stage launch: sunrise opened on 22 August 2024 and ran for a month, then a week of early access, then general availability at standard pricing from 30 September 2024, as covered at the time by Domain Incite. .free, .hot and .spot went through sunrise from 2 April to 2 May 2025, early access from 12 to 17 May 2025 with the price dropping each day, then general availability from 19 May 2025, reported by Gandi's registrar news. .you, .talk and .fast ran sunrise from 26 August to 25 September 2025, early access from 25 September to 6 October 2025, then general availability from 6 October 2025, with no eligibility restrictions on who can register. .pay is currently listed on the registry's own site as coming soon, with a sunrise period that concluded on 20 July 2026. The registry also sells .moi, French for "me", plus five Japanese-script extensions covering cloud, sale, store, food and consumer electronics, though the registry doesn't publish launch or pricing detail on those beyond what individual registrars show at checkout.

Should you actually buy one of these domains?

Understand the pricing stages before you register anything. Sunrise is reserved for trademark holders verified through the Trademark Clearinghouse. Early access is open to anyone, but at a premium price that steps down day by day until general availability, which is the normal ongoing rate. Once an extension like .you or .fast reaches general availability, there's no eligibility test at all, anyone can register any available string.

My honest take: treat .now, .deal, .hot, .free and their siblings as campaign and secondary domains, not primary addresses. They're built for a launch page, a limited-time promotion, or a redirect that points back to your main site, exactly the "timing" and "offers" framing the registry itself uses. Renewal price matters far more than the first-year price on novelty extensions like these, so check both before you buy, not just the number in the shopping basket. Check too whether your exact name is flagged as premium at checkout, which quietly changes the price you'll actually pay. And if you're planning to send or receive mail on a new extension, test deliverability properly before you rely on it, because some mail filters are still cautious with newer strings. We cover the groundwork on how domains, hosting and email fit together in our guide to the basics, and how we actually compare registrar pricing across extensions in our pricing methodology. Browse the full extension list and compare live registrar prices on our domains page, and if you want to see the tool in action, we wrote about building it in our launch post for HostList's domain search.

How do Amazon's novelty extensions compare with Google's and XYZ's?

Amazon isn't the only big operator running short, punchy, campaign-style extensions. Google Registry does the same thing with strings like .boo and .page, and XYZ Registry runs a much larger stable of open, unrestricted extensions covered on our .xyz registry page. The comparison that actually matters isn't the marketing copy, it's renewal pricing, how the registrar handles the sunrise-to-general-availability transition, and whether the registrar you use actually supports the extension properly for email and DNS management. Read the registry's own positioning as marketing, then check the numbers yourself before committing.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns .now?

Amazon Registry Services, Inc. is the sponsoring organisation for .now under its ICANN Registry Agreement, and Nominet is the technical contact that runs the back-end infrastructure. Neither of them sells the domain to you directly, you register it through an accredited registrar such as the options listed on our .now comparison page.

Is .bot a good choice for an AI startup?

It's a reasonable secondary or campaign domain given how the registry positions it, for AI and bot-driven businesses specifically, and it had a longer controlled release than most of Amazon's other strings before opening more widely in 2023. As with any newer extension, check renewal pricing and test email deliverability before making it your primary address rather than a redirect.

Can I register .pay yet?

Not through general availability. The registry lists .pay as coming soon on its own site, with a sunrise period for trademark holders that concluded on 20 July 2026. It has not published a general availability date, so ask your registrar whether it plans to carry .pay and when.