ICA-Americas congratulates DotCoop on its 10th Anniversary
Ten years ago, on January 30, 2002, it was created a unique space for co-operatives on the Internet: the launch of the .coop Internet domain.
The DotCoop domain provides cooperatives a unique platform to promote their cooperative identity. Today, thousands of co-operatives around the world use .coop in their web and email address - the only Internet domain dedicated to a specific business model.
Carolyn Hoover, executive director of DotCoop, the organization which sponsors the domain, said the creation of a domain for co-ops was not without its challenges.
"The first challenge was getting the system infrastructure in place and actually being able to activate our first .coop websites and email addresses in January 2002," she said. "Today there are a number of companies that offer these services but at that time the systems had to be developed from scratch. In addition, we had to build the verification process that ensured that the names were being registered and used only by co-ops - and that was unique on the Internet at that time."
To find out more, go to http://www.thenews.coop/spotlight/celebrating-ten-years-dotcoop.