Mother Earth Wants Her Own Web Address

Posted on July 22, 2009
Filed Under Uncategorized |

by Lauren Ellis

This summer SmartPower’s interns will be offering some fresh views on how to be Energy Smart as they immerse themselves in clean energy and energy efficiency.

With green noise more prevalent than ever, Al Gore and the Alliance for Climate Change are developing an eco-centric top-level domain web address for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN) approval. Dot Eco (.eco) hopes to join the ranks of the classic top-level domain heavyweights, such as .com, .net, and .org, by creating a network exclusively for environmental companies and organizations looking to flash their pearly greens on the viral landscape.

The Dot Eco system will collect information from parties who register with .eco on an open platform, enabling companies and individuals to display detailed eco-information to anyone on the web. Some key tabs are ecolabels, waste, emissions, energy use, water use, and rankings- all of which hit the transparency and credibility marks. Think of .eco as a way to get all the information you’d ever want on a corporation’s environmental efforts, or to settle the score on which products are actually eco-friendly and which ones are just poseurs.

The campaign pulls from a multiplex support team: former James Bond Roger Moore, Davis Guggenheim, producer and director of Alias, 24, The Shield, An Inconvenient Truth (natch), and Richard Muller, physicist at UC Berkeley, and the Sierra Club. With 50% of the profits of Dot Eco LLC going to environmental causes, Al Gore and co. are banking on a successful launch of this initiative in late 2009.

Here’s what Dot Eco’s platform does:
1. First, it will provide a standard place for companies to place their eco efforts.

2. For companies with a truly environmental focus, choosing a .ECO extension as their main web address will help brand them as primarily ecological, as opposed to “commercial” or “non-profit”.

3. Third, the .ECO namespace will open up the possibility of getting a meaningful domain name for millions of registrants who have been “shut out” of .COM by speculative domain holders who have quite literally bought every .com name in the dictionary.

4. Finally, over 50% of the profits of Dot Eco, LLC will go to environmental causes, including the Alliance for Climate Protection and Surfrider. This new fund raising model could provide significant resources for worthwhile causes.

Aren’t we just throwing more babble into the mix here? Diversifying the suffix could open up a viral Pandora’s box, since any cause with enough momentum and backing could lay claim to its own personalized top-level domain address. Granted, companies are spending millions of dollars in domain turf wars, but I don’t want to see “.agro,” “.health” or “.auto” cropping up anytime soon.

Another issue- what’s the vetting process for a “.eco” company? Who deserves the coveted eco tag? Can anyone with the right amount of coinage purchase a “.eco” web address?

BigRoom, the company tasked to create the “.eco” blueprint, strives to quell such fears with the launch of its global policy development process. Pooling feedback from the sustainable communities, international NGOs, and affiliated corporations, BigRoom will hone in on the appropriate filters and criterion for a “.eco” world. That’s still too vague, since anyone with the right megaphone could ostensibly have the power to crown something “.eco” appropriate- which is part of the problem with green marketing in the first place.

So is this a brilliant way to save the planet via the web, or just a well-intended marketing campaign that could detract from the real message? Time will only tell. Either way, for this plan to succeed, there needs to be clear cut criteria for evaluating who deserves a “.eco” domain address and who doesn’t. If not, this campaign will only shove more green backwash down our throats, instead of giving corporations and consumers alike the real tools to enact meaningful change.

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