That is a ridiculous statement. My first name is Travis. I am not the owner of https://travis.io/ but somehow we coexist. That's because even though the name clearly exists, no one owns it. But this guy owns the domain because he registered it first. By your logic this would come down to who the oldest person with the name is. It sounds stupid in this context because it is. There is no principal here, just a money grab by some South American countries who had no interest in the domain until someone rich registered it. If it was a matter of principal they would have objected when Bezos registered amazon.com, but he wasn't a billionaire then, so they didn't care.

Well, you don't own .travis though. Nobody complains that Amazon owns amazon.com

Fair point, but a general objection to privately owned TLD's is not what is being argued in this case.

No, but it is being argued that it’s different/more significant than a standard domain.

Why would Amazonian nations care about Amazon.com? It’s a company called amazon on a commercial TLD. They aren’t even commercial entities.

As a TLD it offers a much more broad use.

This is increasingly less tru as TLD's like .amazon are being given out. There's no reason that a or b in format a.b is more important, other than the fact that the arbitrary convention exists that a can be anything but b can only be one of a few choices.

.amazon is also a commercial TLD if AMZN buys it.

It's a top level domain, not one in the .com namespace.

A top level domain used for commercial purposes is in fact a commercial TLD. It's not the commercial TLD, but it is "a commercial TLD".

Apparently, the answer is the highest bidder.

Wouldn’t it also be the only bidder in this case? Nobody else ever made an application for the .amazon gtld.

Yay... let's put a price tag on everything! Let "the market" decide. What could we also sell... let's see: Air, water, children... the highest (richest?) bidder decides.

Especially if he got rich by exploiting workers (through low wages and bad working conditions, like wearing diapers) and exploiting state regulations (through tax evasion).

We do sell air and water, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Where do we sell air?

Access to clean, drinkable water is a human right, btw.