.ECO Bids for Transparency and Sustainability
In recent years, the environment has become a major issue for governments, businesses and individuals. As environmental concerns percolate through global media outlets, increasingly organizations have been pressured to consider the environmental impact of how they do business. In the world of new gTLDs, .ECO, headed by Big Room’s Trevor Bowden, is working to create a definitive online space for tracking sustainability practices globally.
The .ECO domain is positioned as an alternative to .COM, while being used to broadcast an organization or individual’s commitment to sustainability and the environment. The proposal for .ECO domains allows for anyone to buy a .ECO domain, but with a unique stipulation:
This means that anyone who registers a .ECO domain name will need to make a statement about their commitment to sustainability, and show how they are acting on that commitment by being transparent about their impact. So while anyone can register, keeping a .ECO will require real progress toward sustainability.
Bowden, who spoke last year at NewDomains.org on the panel “How to successfully build a community around your TLD” has been working tirelessly over the past year to bring in sponsors and support for the .ECO domain. Partners for .ECO include the World Wildlife Foundation, Green America, Ocean Conservatory, and Social Accountability International.
.ECO’s vision is to become “a trusted badge that represents a true commitment to sustainability.” In pursuing this goal, Big Room has assembled, in addition to partners, a community council, chaired by Green.TV, and including members such as the David Suzuki Foundation, Conservation International, Greenpeace, UL Environment, an and Verité. You can view the full list on the .ECO website.
Early on, .ECO faced a certain amount of competition, in the form of one of the world’s best known environmental advocates: Nobel-prize winner Al Gore. Gore’s Climate Reality project (originally known as the Alliance for Climate Protection) published a paper as early as 2009 pitching for a.ECO domain.
But just two years later, Climate Reality dropped their new gTLD proposal with partner Dot Eco LLC, allowing rival Canadian firm Big Room (co-founded by Bowden) to proceed unchallenged with their application. Many media outlets noted the “Cold War” overtones regarding the American Climate Reality and Big Room’s backing from Green Cross, a group led by former Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev. (While Dot Eco LLC announced in September 2011 that they would still pursue the .ECO TLD without the support of Gore, their website dotecotld.com has been disabled and now points to TLD Holdings’s Minds + Machines site.) Certainly not everyone
Brian Cute, CEO of the Public Interest Registry (which is applying for the new gTLD .NGO), has publicly called .ECO community a passionate and dynamic factor in the emerging Internet namespace—and predicts it will have the power to become successful. Building support for .ECO has been a tough job for Big Room, but the group certainly seems poised to revolutionize the ecological impact of the Internet.