.eco

‘Rival environmental groups are lining up supporters to try to take control of a new net domain aimed at green groups’ reports BBC Technology reporter Jonathan Fildes, as Canadian environmental group Big Room step in to rival the existing bid of Dot Eco, who have had Al Gore’s backing since March, to operate a new .eco top level domain.

At this point it seems that there isn’t that much to separate the two groups in terms of how they are envisioning the use of the new domain – both see it as an opportunity to raise money for environmental charities, while at the same time providing an incentive for big companies to boost their efforts to reduce their carbon footprints in order to bag the coveted .eco status to show off their all-important green credentials.

Of course, there is one big problem. The conditions that a company or organization will have to meet to be granted the domain name. As Dot Eco co-founder Minor Childers himself has pointed out, if you make them too strict the whole thing will fail to take off, but if you make them too lenient the whole thing will be a meaningless exercise in corporate cosmetics.

Either way, good intentions aside, early next year it seems very likely that .eco will be the latest green start-up to be pounced on by PR departments of big brands seizing the latest opportunity to grip ever-tighter to the increasingly overloaded green bandwagon.

The problem is, as Katie Fehrenbacher of Business Week points out, ‘vetting companies for compliance with environmental criteria could take a tremendous amount of work, and proposed restrictions could easily be ineffective without oversight.’ Indeed, unlike for .ac.uk or .gov, where the criteria for a site’s suitability for the domain name is pretty clear, .eco could feasibly mean just about anything.

Should it represent the actual content of the website, the organization’s environmental policy, or its products if it’s a company… how would you differentiate between a commercial website, a charitable organization, an academic institution… Should the UK Environment Agency go with .eco instead of .gov.uk, and will the United Nations Environment Programme website end up sharing a domain name with potentially any commercial enterprise with a carefully PR-tweaked reduced carbon footprint?

If it brings in money for environmental charities, of course, that would be fantastic. But my concern is that it will be abused. Defining the suitability (let alone relevance) of a potential .eco website would be an enormous, amorphous and time-consuming task, and judging by .eco’s green-paper outlining the restrictions that will be in place to prevent ‘greenwashing’, they are well aware of this…

We believe it would be a serious mistake to limit or standardize such sites according to an arbitrary structure with self-reported data. Likewise, pre-screening individual .ECO applicants, is expensive and time-consuming and leads to user dissatisfaction, higher costs and a reduced number of proper registrations.

Individual registrants will sign off on a set of clear terms and conditions for the use of a .ECO web address. All .ECO registrants will be required to agree to our Founding Principles, listed above.

To identify violations of these tenets, .ECO will rely on community policing along with our own monitoring…’

So, essentially it seems pretty likely that the online community will make the decisions about who is allowed to use .eco. In many ways that’s fair enough, and considering the inherent minefields of definitions and politics wrapped up in defining environmental credibility, it’s difficult to suggest a system that would work any better.

Now, it’s not that I have anything against the collective wisdom of internet users across the globe, but as we’ve already learned with Wikipedia, Facebook and numerous other social networking sites, a unified, calm and open debate about anything is basically impossible… diversity of opinion is what the web thrives on, and online communities have always fiercely rejected any kind of top-down intervention when it comes to self-regulation. Aside from the sprawling, un-winnable arguments that will no doubt rocket their way across the web as astroturfing PR companies, high-profile commentators and entire communities get stuck in, to what extent will Dot Eco / Big Room be able to intervene, and be able to measure and justify their actions against the attitudes of the masses?

A fascinating project for sure, and for a very good cause, but I have a horrible feeling it could all get rather messy…