Barnes and noble wanted one of these domains and sent an appeal to ICANN. They lost the appeal.
Amazon operates these domains within a category of new domain names deemed “closed generics”, which are domain names that companies have successfully bid on or outright paid to get provisioned and own them for their own use and no one else’s. There has been persistent concern raised that this might create unfair monopolies especially for online shopping.
Amazon is the largest holder of closed generic domains on the internet. Nearly all of their domains they own are not able to be purchased and are for Amazon use only. There has been no consequences for this action and it seems unlikely there ever will for the foreseeable future as well.
It’s a pretty new thing. In recent years many new TLDs have been added.
See here for a full list currently supported on the open web: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
Companies are now allowed to add TLDs to this, if they can provide a reason and the infrastructure needed to make them usable.
Amazon owning those TLDs and not allowing registration for it is not okay in my opinion. The words “book” and “read” are not exclusively used by Amazon.
Here is some insight into the process: https://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/draft-rfp-clean-12nov10-en.pdf
worth noting that the infrastructure and compliance requirements are pretty damn big, and the fee for registering a gTLD is quite steep (compared to most costs related to domains and the internet)