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With ICANN getting ready to begin receiving applications for new TLDs, there are a lot of great ideas for new extensions, but also a lot of duds.
Chief among them is the proposed .eco TLD. Even worse, two companies seem to think it’s a good idea and are fighting for the rights to the extension.
One, Dot Eco LLC, is actually owned by Al Gore. It plans on using the former Vice President himself to market the domains and give most of the profits to charity. Under Dot Eco’s plan, anyone could register a .eco name.
Another company, BigRoom (see video above), wants to do something much different. It would only allow certain organizations to register the name. This would in effect require very high registration fees and prevent widespread adoption.
Regardless whether one of the two companies or neither gets the rights to .eco, why would anyone register such an extension in the first place? Sure, there is a small niche of “green” sites, but a few hundred registrations a year won’t cover the hundreds of thousands of pounds required to operate a TLD. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth may have been a hit, but the truth is no one will find his TLD convenient enough to bother with.
Source: EcoGeek
