DotGreen to Battle DotEco

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 regarding; you need to get a monopoly TLD.

I ought to have done some fact checking, since, buried beneath all of the hoopla around .eco, a group has disclosed .green.

And, as stated by a press release regarding 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 disclosed 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 firms 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 fresh category of defensive registrations.