Amazon has beaten Google in a bid to acquire the .buy top-level domain.

ICANN, the international Internet regulator, has awarded (PDF) Amazon the .buy domain after the company successfully outbid three other competitors in an auction. Amazon paid $4.6 million in an auction that ended on Wednesday. Google came in second place through its registry service, Charleston Road Registry. Google lost other auctions on .tech and .vip, as well.

Amazon has yet to say what it will do with the .buy domain. CNET has contacted Amazon and Google for comment and will update this story when we have more information.

Google has its own registry service, operated by Charles Road Registry, that will allow the company to offer domains in a wide range of top-levels, including .ads, .dad, .eat. In 2012, Google posted a table showing all of the top-level domains that it wanted to offer through its registry service. .Buy was among them.

There has been an ongoing gold rush for top-level domains ever since ICANN announced in 2011 that it would expand them outside the scope of the standards such as .com, .org and .gov. Several companies in addition to Apple and Google have been acquiring the domains and see them as possible revenue sources, if the domanins prove applicable to a particular industry or need.

The .buy domain presents an obvious opportunity. It's possible that Amazon might use the domain to leverage its own might on the Web and draw more people to its pages. Google was ostensibly planning to offer the domain to e-commerce companies, though the company never said exactly what it had planned.

(Via The Next Web)