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Rival Green Groups Bid To Snatch .eco Domain
Peace Corps Library writes "BBC reports that two rival environmental groups are lining up supporters to try to take control of the new .eco domain aimed at green groups. In March, former US vice president Al Gore backed a bid by the California group Dot Eco to operate the .eco TLD, but now a Canadian environmental group known as Big Room has launched a competing bid to manage it. 'We're two different applicants with two different business ideas. Ours is to sell domain names to raise funds for organizations who can effect change,' says Minor Childers, co-founder of Dot Eco. The group has already entered into contracts with its supporters — such as the Sierra Club and the Alliance for Climate Protection — to give away 57% of its profits from sales. Big Room also plans to generate money from the sale of .eco domain names to fund sustainability projects around the world, however, the consortium, which includes WWF International and Green Cross International — founded in 1993 by former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, also believes that .eco could be used as a labeling system to endorse companies with green credentials. Despite having differences about a model for .eco, both groups will 'definitely have to sit down' together at some point, says Childers. 'We could be one of the biggest contributors to environmental causes anywhere in the world.'"
Forgive my cynicism but in my experience, humans are not altruistic at all. Like monkeys, we do what we do because it benefits us.
While I fully support green causes for my own selfish reasons (my children), I am skeptical about the motivations of "green" groups. They seem to be using green as a fashion statement and an identity, and don't seem all that motivated to be effective.
But if given a chance to push us around for not being green... they're good at that.
Can't we just create the "Green Police" that ecosopher Pentti Linkola recommended, and be done with these irksome charities?
...'cause Al Gore invented both the Internet and ecology!
organizations should have claim to an entire TLD? Even if they "sit down together", that's still an awful lot of authority being placed in the hands of a very few people. I suspect that there are some other outfits that might want to have a say in this.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The further you get from .com the less the domain matters(at least among non-country coded TLDs). .com is the best, .net and .org are ok, things like .gov are niche, and pretty much anything else is either a once-off gimmick(pidgin.im is clever; but the world's set of IM programs might consume a few dozen domains, total) or just a slum domain that only search engine crawlers will find directly.
.com/.net/.org addresses, the only thing that matters is whether you have a decent rank on common search engines.
"Green" is all the rage at the moment(or, at least, greenwashing is); but I don't see that changing the basic fact that, for anything besides highly recognisable
There are lots of TLDs that no one ever thinks about and hardly ever use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains
When was the last time you visited a .biz site? Have you ever found a position using the .jobs TLD?
How cool is it that the TLD for mobile devices is longer than the usual 3 letter TLD?
Found a lawyer or doctor using the .pro TLD lately? Could you point someone to a good travel agent on the .travel TLD?
Face it, there are only 5 real, non-national TLDs: .com, .org, .edu, .Net, and .gov. All the others are just a waste of time.
If organizations with "green" or conversationalist initiatives as basically your sole customers, why would you charge more than you need to for a domain name and then hand some of the profits back to the same set of companies? In this case, wouldn't it be best to just lower your prices and run as a straight non-profit?
Or for all the giving back bullshit, is this yet another poorly conceived attempt at cashing in on the popularity of the green movement? Who am I kidding? This yet another poorly conceived attempt at cashing in on the popularity of the green movement.
Just how many domains do they think they're going to be selling? At competitive rates you'd have to sell tens of thousands just to keep a single person employed to maintain the TLD, never mind having some money to give away.
Anyone here old enough to remember the first ecology movement? It, too, was lame, with it's own lame, green flag. Just green-n-white bars like the US flag, but a silly character in the middle of the field.
Being good stewards, yes. Endocrinating young children into fairy tales, no. Things like Captain Planet get under my skin. The science they point to is grey at best, and it all serves political parties.
I mean, whether it's hotter than usual, or colder than usual, BOTH are a sign of ManMadeGlobalWarming(TM) for which money must be sent to Washington. That's not science, that's religion!
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
On the flipside, it would be kind of nice to have a .nut domain for all the right-wing neocons and nutjobs out there. It would be easier to just block anything in that TLD,... ;-)
Will anyone even know its there, or care?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As in $$$$$. Sheesh. The usual pattern: From cause to movement to racket. And then the bureaucracy takes it all over. Repeat as needed.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
China is their model. Our model I dare say. Modern population growth is preposterous. Unsustainable doesn't even begin to describe it.
We have too many people on this planet as it is, and there's no good way to get them off the planet, the energy requirements are simply too great. If we're going to colonize, we won't be sending more than a few thousand to start the colony, and then it will not be able to support any significant migrants from a Terran perspective. Population control is essential.
Which is why we should deprecate them and turn toward country level TLD's. Let individual countries have control over what domains are allowable. If a company, say Google, has a server in the US, their .com name would end up as google.com.us, if they have a server in Germany, it would be google.com.de. A government web site in the US would be congress.gov.us or in Germany, bundestag.gov.de.
This could even extend to political organizations with in a State. So, in the US, fl.gov.us would be the root to all of the Florida state government web sites, where as ut.gov.us would be for Utah's state government.
There are plenty more examples, but it comes down to de-centralizing control over DNS to the lowest level of political representation.
Instead of creating new domains, they should be recycling old ones.
I am disappointed that www.steve.jobs doesn't resolve.
The reason we deride them is because they are all about problems, not about solutions. It is easy to point out the problems in life. Why? Because everything has a cost. Anything you do, there's a cost to, there's a downside. As such, no matter what choice you make, you can always say "This is the problem with that choice." That isn't hard, nor is it productive.
What is needed is to weigh the costs, and by costs we me economic and non-economic, of various solutions and then attempt to choose which one gives the most benefits with the least costs. They ALL have costs, downsides, that isn't the issue. The issue is which is the best.
Well green groups are notoriously bad for simply not caring. They just hate on all solutions. They say you are doing X poorly. So you say ok, well here's a way we can address that. They then hate on the new solution. They are whiners, not problem solvers.
The only thing they ever seem to agree is a solution is to give lots and lots of money to green organizations. They don't have a clear goal as to what will be done with it that'll make an improvement, but they need lots of money. That seems more than a little self serving.
That's why many people give them crap. If they want more people to take them seriously they need to grow up. They can't just point out problems, they have to start coming up with solutions. Also those have to be real solutions, not "We should all go back to preindustrial society, never mind that 90%+ of humans have to die for that to happen." So long as they just hate on any real solution, people are going to keep ignoring them.