Two companies hope to break ground on prime real estate: the dot-eco domain suffix. (iStockphoto)

When new online real estate is carved out of cyberspace next year, two companies are hoping it will include a swath of eco-friendly property.

A California-based group named Dot Eco LLC and Vancouver company Big Room are gearing up for a battle to control the dot-eco domain registry, giving it power to dole out use of the three-letter suffix.

Each has support from environmental heavyweights, each plans to donate part of their proceeds and each is willing to fork over almost $200,000 US to submit a bid to manage use of the three-letter suffix.

The two part ways when it comes to methodology, however.

Dot Eco LLC vows to donate half its profits to groups combating global warming and has partnered with former U.S. vice-president and environmental crusader Al Gore and the Alliance for Climate Protection.

Their vision as extolled by co-founder Minor Childers on their slick Arctic-themed website is as follows: "Across the globe we are witnessing an awakening, a realization that the imprint of human activity has finally overwhelmed the earth's ability to absorb it .… [Dot-eco is] a tool to call us together, to share what we're doing right and to power our efforts to do better."

What company to keep

Lofty goals, but ones that rival Big Room is trying to paint as not lofty enough.

"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. "This thing is going to be around for a long time. Let's make sure that it works and is a useful solution.

Similar to Dot Eco, Big Room plans to donate some of its proceeds to charitable causes — 25 per cent of its revenues, compared to its competitor's plan to donate a 50 per cent portion of profits, the amount after expenses.

"Who will actually donate more money is of course unclear at this stage, but what I do know is that someone can run a very profitable business, but not have any profits if they spend it all on other things," Bowden wrote to CBCNews.ca.

Big Room would also widen potential donor recipients to any group supporting sustainability and ones selected with the help of user input.

Most importantly, Big Room — founded by three former co-workers at the UN Environment Programme in Geneva — is plugging transparency measures in an effort to avoid company greenwashing.

"Our vision for dot-eco has been about creating a transparency platform," Bowden told CBC's The Current.

That's seen as one way to counter questions about what companies or products will qualify for a dot-eco address. It's a much simpler process for country-based top-level domains, such as dot-ca, where the company needs only prove that it's Canadian.

Under the Big Room plan, companies, individuals or products applying for the domain will be required to submit environmental data for public display, allowing consumers to make more informed choices.

By comparison, when companies or individuals seek to secure the dot-eco suffix from the California company, they'll be required to declare support for specific principles behind the green domain.

The Vancouver company's bid has secured backing from Canada's David Suzuki Foundation, as well as international players such as the World Wildlife Fund and Green Cross International, a group founded by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

While Big Room and Dot Eco are two applicants who have gone public with their intentions in order to garner support, competition could grow as the 2010 deadline nears.

Dot-com still rules

The move to secure registration rights for dot-eco was set in motion last year when the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, a non-profit regulatory body that oversees domain names, announced it was loosening controls over top-level domains, potentially opening the floodgates to hundreds of new ones.

Proposals floating around include such suffixes as dot-gay, dot-bank and dot-sport.

Karla Valente from ICANN says when the application process begins in 2010, applicants will have to prove that they have the technical and financial capability of running the registry.

"Once [the company] goes through the evaluation, there's no objection and everything is all right, it goes through what we call a delegation process so really it's signing a contract with ICANN," says Valente.

Questions remain, however, about whether a green footprint will make a big enough online splash.

Roy McClean, owner of an internet marketing and web development company Custom Fit Online Communications, wonders how much the last two or three letters of a domain really matter.

"Dot-com is the de facto top-level domain but it's really more and more the quality of your website on a number of factors that determines your search engine visibility," he told CBC's The Current.

The majority of online activity is centred around queries on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. That means, in the end, their algorithms and the popularity of the site largely determine ranking, not the top-level domain suffix.

One thing, though, is for certain, McClean says: "I believe there will be economic profit for whoever gets control of the domain."

With files from The Current