The International Organic Federation sends letter of support for .BIO to ICANN

The International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) send a letter of support for the .bio gTLD to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The membership based organization, created in 1972, has over 750 members and representation in over 115 countries in the world. IFOAM’s work has been supporting organic standards and markets worldwide.

The organization had previously submitted comments about the application to ICANN by Starting Dot for the ownership of the global Top Level Domain (gTLD) .bio. IFOAM had significant interaction and meetings with Starting Dot and now wishes to rescind those previous comments. The organization now supports the .BIO application.

Starting Dot proactively engaged with IFOAM to explain its intentions, approach and concrete implementation plans for administration, oversight and control of the .bio gTLD. IFOAM’s concerns were put to rest by Starting Dot’s explanation of its initial registration policy and the related control and public feedback mechanisms they plan to implement upon launch and subsequent management of the .BIO gTLD. Starting Dot even improved its initial registry policy.

IFOAM hereby endorses the Starting Dot application for .bio in an equal fashion and finds that the Starting Dot application and approach to be the best suited to serve their objectives.

This is much in contrast to the application for .organic to which IFOAM repeated their opposition as that they are against an unrestricted registry policy application.