DotGreen to take on DotEco.
When I wrote my tongue-in-cheek guide on how to my .Eco a success, I joked:
Make sure the other side doesn’t decide to just get .green instead. You need to get their heads stuck on .eco. If they opt for .green, you could have long term competition. And that’s not what this is about; you need to get a monopoly TLD.
I should have done some fact checking, because, buried beneath all of the hoopla around .eco, a group has announced .green.
And, according to a press release about the group choosing Neustar as its registry provider, it was their idea first:
Conceived in 2007, .green was the first environmental TLD proposed to international environmental groups, and the DotGreen Registry Corporation remains the only announced non-profit public benefit corporation to seek such an environmental domain. DotGreen accepts philanthropic donations, has no owners or shareholders, and will give 100% of its profits to hundreds of green projects and green organizations aimed at sustainability in every region of the world.
So this begs the question, what would companies do if there’s both .eco and .green? Which one will win? Will GE choose both a .eco and .green, or will it forward one to the other? Or will it just go with GE.com/green? It might create an entirely new category of defensive registrations.
Shaun says
.dumb vs .dumber
M. Menius says
LOL! Perfect.
gpmgroup says
It’s a big sell to get extra resources to invest in companies’ current websites for pages that don’t generate revenues.
So on the surface at least it’s difficult to envisage how all but the most committed of companies and individuals will be prepared to invest time and resources in creating .green or .eco sites.
Jothan says
Andrew, the bias is evident against new TLDs here on DomainNameWire… Like for example, there’s no ‘both’ option in the poll.
Andrew Allemann says
Jothan – true. Do you think both .green and .eco can be successful at the same time?
Steve M says
All this posturing and positioning is like watching birds pecking at each other for food that’s never going to be given them…
Jothan says
@andrew Sure, why not. The market will be able to determine the winner, not me.
I just want to see the market get its opportunity to do so.
Andrew Allemann says
Jothan – since you’re in the thick of this, perhaps you can clear something up. I read an article (can’t remember where) that suggested that something like .green and .eco could be considered too similar to both be approved. That sounds contrary to how I’ve interpreted the guidebooks. What’s your take?
Jothan says
Sure, and thanks for asking…
Currently there is a process of drafting the applicant guidebook. The concept of what strings (TLDs) collide with which is being looked at from a number of angles.
Most of the ways are fairly transparent… I’ll geek out here and go through some of the rankings in the algorithm that’s being used (It’s called “SWORD”), but they’re using things like string similarity, soundex, levenschtein distance, plus visual similarity like lower case L and the number one (visually l=1) or the letter ‘oh’ and the number zero (visually O=0), and keyboard typos (like for example .VOM,.XOM or .PRG might be non-starters).
Although .eco or .green might seem similar in their overall approach for the good cause of environmental efforts (your recent post on the dried up river near you was quite alarming), the two strings are probably distinct enough by that review that they would not collide in the initial review.
There will be interesting things to resolve, like for example would Hershey, PA be the most approriate party to apply for .hershey or would the candy manufacturer or the systems integration company that owns hershey.com?
Andrew Allemann says
Thanks Jothan. The Hershey example is particularly interesting since there are aspects to the guidebook for both geo locations and communities. It seems that most of what I’m seeing out there hope to apply as communities, and it seems that community TLDs are favored above general ones…if I’m interpreting it correctly.
Mike says
Let them have their no-mans land gTLDs. Don’t let them say they were not warned!
Like someone said in some forum recently, “Try to find a partner that wants to partner with you on any current extension other than a .com”. You can’t find one anywhere.
The .com still has not filled up or even been 1/3 of the way developed. What makes anyone think any other extension will fill up with buyers and developers? It will be a sea of undeveloped domains….MUCH worse than .com is right now. A virtual ghost town of extensions will exist, you’ll be able to go into each extension like passing through a door, only to find nobody home in each extension.
Imagine a surfer to a new extension making 20 site visits with 16 undeveloped site/domain encounters ; that surfer will gravitate back to the .com where there is more development.
Remember…surfers do the least work they have to do to get what they want. If they are cognizant of their surfing they take the path of least resistance, which will be the leader .com.
The one and only way to make they jump to the other gTLDs in significant numbers is more and better content. It won’t happen in our lifetimes. 🙂
Crazy dumb!
Bean says
Was just doing some research myself on the .green vs .eco top-level domain root zones. Both your comments and those of the readers are in general well thought out and useful interpretations. I had some heavy laughs amongst the otherwise thought provoking analysis. Thank You!