Hey there Folks!
You may have heard that there’s been a bit of a spat between former American Presidential runner and climate change enthusiast Al Gore and former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev over a “dot eco” domain suffix: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/28/al-gore-group-eco-domain
The whole palaver is over who gets to have control over the “.eco” internet Top Level Domain name, following the introduction of 22 new web suffixes being given the go ahead by internet regulator ICANN (which sounds more like something Obama would promote!). Gore is the man behind campaign group Alliance for Climate Protection, who are bidding against Canadian rivals Big Room, who themselves are supported by Green Cross International, which was founded by Gorbachev. Gore and Gorby are go-go-going at it a-gogo!
It appears that Gore and pals have dropped out of the race due to lack of funding, leaving Gorby and Big Room to take up the reins.
Big Room has the support of Greenpeace, as well as many other environmental groups like WWF and the Green Belt Movement, so this should have a positive effect on the web and big businesses treat climate change issues, hopefully helping to make them disclose and reduce their emissions. Big Room’s Big Idea is to get big companies to disclose their global carbon emission output, which at present is something that they don’t all do. If we knew which businesses were the worst culprits, it would be easier to hold them to account, and shame those with the nastiest excesses, as well as keeping tabs on emission levels and waste, making data a lot clearer and more visible.
Co-founder of Big Room, Trevor Bowden, has said that trying to regulate big oil and gas companies from registering .eco addresses will be a bit like a game of “Whack-a-Mole”. Not quite the eco-friendly response you’d necessarily hope for, but moles do seem to be left in the dark, underground, without anyone shedding any light on them, only molecatchers occasionally prodding them with forks.
As the Guardian article elucidates, “The success of Big Room's application to Icann will hinge on how much "community support" it can demonstrate. If it fails to meet Icann's community criteria, it will be pitted against other top-level domain operators in a potentially pricey auction battle. Bowden said: "If we, as the community, are not able to achieve this recognition from the regulator, .eco will be awarded to the highest bidder – which history shows is often a bad way of allocating public goods."”
We hope that we can get big corporations to sign up and come clean. It's about time.
Stay gore-roovy!
Tom Read, Norwich Greenpeace Member
PS. Another interesting blog view on the subject can be found here: http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/al-gore-vs-mikhail-gorbachev-...
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