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DNS Structure: New Top Level Domains

About Dot-Coop

.coop -- for co-operative business organizations

.coop is run by the National Cooperative Business Association, a nonprofit industry association. Another niche interest, but useful within its market (and hoped by its proponents to encourage the expansion of the market for co-ops).

Co-ops are defined by the sponsor of this domain as being a special type of business owned by its members rather than existing to make a profit -- as such, they fall somewhere between the present .com and .org categories.

Negotiations with ICANN were reportedly stalled due to a request on the part of the sponsoring organization that the terms be changed in a major way from their original application -- they supposedly wished to use a monopoly registrar rather than competitive registrars as originally proposed. However, negotiations resumed, and now the agreement has been signed and the domain was officially launched on January 30, 2002 and a WHOIS server is up.

One interesting thing: in attachment 23 of their agreement, the sponsoring organization promises to set up a site with information for potential registrants at www.communicate.coop. However, this name is not on the list of names the sponsor has reserved for itself, which they're required to disclose in the ICANN agreement. When .coop was first added to the root, communicate.coop didn't even work (while nic.coop did), but it was added a few days later as a redirect to a page within the site.

.coop seems to have been one of the quietest and most uneventful new TLD launches; there hasn't been any controversy or discussion relating to it, or any speculative activity, or much in the way of registration and use of the domain by legitimate co-ops for that matter. Trying their WHOIS shows that just about any name you can think of is still available (contrast this with .com, where it's hard to think of an even marginally meaningful name or acronym that isn't long since taken).