Press Coverage
- FT | A battle for online naming rights Big Room is hoping to win rights to the .eco name through a community-focused approach that looks to involve environmental groups in setting up the project.
- The Hindu | Greens to have exclusive Internet domain name "It’s critical that the rules for operating .eco — including who can buy names, how proceeds are used, what it stands for, and how a trust is maintained — are transparent, accountable, community-based and designed for the long-term benefit of people and the environment."
- Techvibes | Dot Eco domain name may be calling Vancouver home Malthouse and Big Room Inc. will be applying to run the “.eco” (dot eco) registry. Big Room was founded in in 2007 with the goal of creating Dot Eco and over the last couple years they have assembled an international team of investors, advisors and partners to help design a model that would be socially, environmentally and financially sustainable.
- NY Times | Companies Vie for Control of ‘Dot-Eco’ Big Room says that under its stewardship, companies and groups that apply for use of the .eco domain would be required to provide comprehensive information about the ecological aspects of their operations. Big Room says it would then build a platform to make this information available to the public.
- CBC | The coming dot-eco boom: battling for the green domain "Our question from the very beginning has been what's the maximum benefit we can get from dot-eco," said Big Room co-founder Trevor Bowden. "[Dot Eco] is going to be around for a long time. Let's make sure that it works and is a useful solution.
- CBC Radio: The Current | .eco Battle Big Room speaks to CBC Radio's "The Current" about their vision for the dot eco domain suffix.
- Worldchanging | Transparency, Accountability and the "dot eco" Debate According to Trevor Bowden of Big Room, “Some really big questions have to be addressed with this opportunity. The community needs to make a call here, and decide how .eco should be run for the long term.”
- Green Living | Can A Domain Change the World? ...Big Room is as focused on gathering this data as it is on donating money to environmental causes. “We want to collect information, aggregate it, build a platform of it and give it away," says Trevor Bowden, one of the three founders of Big Room.
- The Times (UK) | Al Gore and Mikhail Gorbachev battle for control of .eco domain Trevor Bowden, a co-founder of Big Room, said: “Domain names are uniquely able to fight for our planet because they are global, accessible from any web browers, anytime, anywhere and already used by millions.
- TriplePundit | Big Room’s Vision for Dot Eco: Let the Consumer Decide Who Is Green [Big Room]...want to do more than just sell domain names. Instead their model is to provide a tool for companies to disclose their eco credentials and then serve up this information as structured data on a platform that anyone can access. They are also working on an application programming interface (API) that will allow developers to build useful applications on top of this structured data.
- BBC News | Rivals bid to snatch green domain ".eco should mean something and it should be about something more than just another domain," Trevor Bowden told BBC News...Mr Bowden envisages that the companies would use the .eco sites to publish all of their green information. "We think transparency is a really powerful tool," he said.
- Toronto Star | Groups battle to rule dot-eco registry "It occurred to us there was a real opportunity for a tool that would help people create an eco-identity, and that dot-eco was a perfect mechanism for doing that," said Bowden, who co-founded Big Room in 2007 with the goal of becoming a registry with the exclusive authority to allocate the dot-eco address extension.
- ecorazzi | Gorbachev's Green Cross Org Backs Competing Dot Eco Effort [Big Room's .eco]...would also make applicants of the domain disclose “environmental and social performance” in order to receive the extension — something that might make a bit more sense than the “community policing” angle offered by Gore’s group.
- TreeHugger | Al Gore Vs Mikhail Gorbachev? The Latest on the .eco Domain Battle... Big Room's Dot Eco would make transparent all the sustainability information about any entity that applies for a domain name, so that anyone accessing that website will be able to immediately see exactly what they need to know to understand where that entity falls on the green spectrum.
- Click Green | Environmental organisations call for .eco domain Big Room's vision for .eco is to allocate a percentage of revenues (not profits) to organisations around the world. The organisations who will benefit from these revenues will be decided at a later date.
- TreeHugger | Competition for .eco Domain Heating Up We need more than simply a charity and a green banner. We need these things, plus business transparency, environmental accountability, a reduction in carbon footprints and easy-to-access information for users. It sounds like Big Room's .eco project is more likely to lead us towards that.
- Green Pages Australia | The race for .eco With representatives from local environmental organizations and businesses attending (including EcoFutures, Regnan, Institute for Sustainable Futures and of course, the Green Pages) the first regional consultation meeting in Sydney, the Canadian based group surveyed regional stakeholders in the "eco community" for their input on the potential domain.
- EMN | Green cred online through .eco extension Big Room’s ‘Oceania’ consultation in Sydney kicks off a series of seven similar meetings it will hold around the world as the new registry hopeful seeks feedback from industry experts on how it should design and run .eco. Among the issues to be nutted out are what sort of controls will be used to ensure those who use the domain do adhere to high environmental standards and don’t just use the extension as the latest greenwash marketing accessory.
- InternetNews | Top Level Domains Get .eco Friendly "I think .eco makes a lot of sense intuitively to people as a place to get green information," Trevor Bowden co-founder of .eco bidder Big Room told InternetNews.com. "We wanted to go beyond just selling domain names and raise awareness. We want to build a useful tool and platform."
- Business Green | Big Room joins race for .eco control "The aim would be for companies to register for the .eco domain in the same way they do for any other domain, but they would also have to disclose some additional information on their eco-credentials in order to secure the domain," [Trevor Bowden] said.
- FT.com | A .eco echo in green domain bid “We’ve got a vision of bringing the global community around this bid and building a useful open platform..."
- Dynamic Export | Eco URL to fight greenwashing worldwide “Greenwashing is an information problem. Our goal is to create an information solution by using the global power of .eco to collect, store, and share sustainability information,” said Big Room co-founder Anastasia O’Rourke.
- ecorazzi | Gore And Friends Make Their Case For Dot Eco Domain Trevor Bowden of Big Room...“Our vision for .eco is about creating an open, global platform for eco-information on products, companies, or even individuals. And we don’t want to reinvent the wheel to do this."
- ecogeek | Dot Eco Domains May Arrive Soon, What Should We Do With Them? The Big Room people also want the .eco domain names to be one piece of a larger scheme in which companies, organizations and individuals share information about their ecological footprint.
- TreeHugger | Big Room's .eco Domain Could Make the World Greener, More Transparent ... Big Room hopes to get ahold of .eco, and has some big ideas about what to with it, like, oh, change the world.
