1. Whether one uses an affiliate link or a straight link, the price of the book to the purchaser is the same. The difference is that Amazon makes 5 to 15% less on the purchase (which they presumably consider money well spent as they have done this for most of their existence, in fact they were granted a controversial patent on it), and the affiliate referrer receives that money instead.

2. For anyone following such an affiliate referral link who then continues to browse Amazon and purchases lawn furniture or whatever Amazon is selling these days, the affiliate referrer also receives 5 to 15% of the sale price of those subsequent purchases, again at no additional cost to the purchaser.

3. Because there is no additional cost to the purchaser I see nothing wrong with ICANNWatch doing this to help fund its operational costs, or to help defray the cost of adding additional features. In fact I'd suggest an additional sidebar (hey, congrats on being named Political Site of the Day) to the right or left on the home page linking to relevant books such as Ruling the Root, Ellen Rony's Domain Name Handbook (which remains very relevant), and other books I, and no doubt others, could suggest. Along those lines, perhaps a PayPal link could be prominently provided for those who appreciate ICANNWatch and would like to make a donation to support its operations.

4. If ICANNWatch already has an Amazon affiliate relationship, or if/when it gets one, I'd appreciate the proper URL code being displayed somewhere as I've linked from here to Amazon in the past and may again in future and would prefer to use an affil link that benefits ICANNWatch. I hasten to add that my previous links to Amazon were straight links, I didn't use my own affil codes.

And I found this strange, under More Buying Choices in the Amazon upper right sidebar for Ruling the Root, one is given the option of:

3 new: from $29.99
1 used: from $32.62

Is the used one autographed by the author to justify its increased price? :) -g

Winterson first brought the case (and otherwise made it a cause célèbre in the UK) under the mistaken understanding that the affiliate commission that Amazon would have paid the original registrant for selling one of her books would have cut into the amount she would receive from Amazon for the sale of one of her books. She was quoted at the time as saying she wouldn't have cared about the domain name except that it was costing her money. Well, it wasn't. So from that mistake we get the quasi pseudo ersatz case law that one Peter Frampton trumps another. -g