Al Gore has something to say, and this time it’s about those little letters that come after a web site name and a dot. Gore is campaigning on behalf of Dot Eco, a company that’s working on getting .ECO added as another top level domain, like .ORG or .BIZ. To do so, .ECO needs to be approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICAAN) and that’s where Al Gore, along with other familiar green faces like Jim Moriarty from the Surfrider Foundation and Davis Guggenheim (the director of An Inconvenient Truth), comes in. He’s thrown his support behind the Dot Eco concept and is urging others to do the same.

It may seem like an insignificant element in light of bigger environmental issues, but Dot Eco—done right—could have some real benefits to both green sites and their visitors. Nonprofits would be able to use .ECO for free and it would spare them from having to pay for names in the .COM domain that have already been bought up for resale purposes. For-profit green sites would be able to purchase .ECO names and over 50% of the proceeds from those purchases would go back to nonprofits, which could result in much-needed financial support for environmental causes. The creators have also said that putting .ECO at the end of a web address would come with certain stipulations and would be regulated to avoid misleading visitors who would seek out the domain as a sign of truly green websites.

There are concerns, however, about the Dot Eco campaign, namely for the regulations that would go along with .ECO. Some worry that too strict of specifications would take too much time and money to enforce, others worry that too lax regulations would further enable greenwashers, who could add the .ECO without any real evidence to back up their environmental aims.

To decide for yourself you can visit the Dot Eco site and find out who’s behind the new domain, exactly what they’re trying to do and—if you deem it worthy—how you can help their cause.

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