Saturday, September 15, 2012

The .NGO Top-Level Domain

dotNGO, the project to establish and run the new generic Top Level Domain for the charity and NGO community is working with Public Interest Registry – the .org people.

Together they are working on the community bid to run .NGO. dotNGO was set up in 2008 to campaign for and promote the launch of a secure gTLD exclusively for the NGO sector. Until 2011 there was only a commercial initiative available (set up by dotNGO and partnered by another back-end registry provider) to apply for the domain as a “standard” or commercial application.

This commercial bid was backed by funding from an investors who saw commercial value in adding the domain to their proposed portfolio of applications. The dotNGO project as an organisation was not eligible to stand as a Community Applicant under the ICANN rules stating that the applicant for a community bid must be a pre-existing community member and not an organisation set up in response to the opening of the new gTLD space. dotNGO was of course set up in response to the ICANN process opening in mid 2008. 

In 2011 the campaign among NGO community members was taken up by Public Interest registry – who run the .org domain. dotNGO is now working exclusively with the community bid and PIR to make sure that the .NGO gTLD is a success, and rests in the hands of the NGO community themselves.

www.dotNGO.net is the project’s website.

.BRAND new gTLD Reports are updated once a month: CLICK HERE !