OK Secures Coveted Domain

By COLlive reporter

It’s official: Dot-kosher belongs to OK Kosher.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has ruled last month that OK Kosher is the owner of the coveted “.kosher” surname for website domains.

To obtain dot-kosher, OK Kosher paid a $185,000 application fee and will be subject to a $25,000 renewal fee, reported the Jewish Week.

Rabbi Don Yoel Levy, CEO of the Crown Heights based kashrus agency, says that they purchased the domain name not to have exclusive right to it, but to keep it out of the hands of a businessman they knew was interested in pursuing it.

“We felt it should be in the hands of a kashrus institution,” he said, according to the newspaper. “We purchased it to make sure it fell into the right hands. We’re willing to share with everybody.”

ICANN’s decision didn’t go down well in the heavily competitive kashrus industry. A dot-kosher domain would show up high in Google search results for food manufacturers looking to get certified and kosher consumers seeking information, the Jewish Week wrote.

A coalition of 11 kashrus agencies opposing OK Kosher’s ownership paid about $100,000 in fees to ICANN and to its lawyers. Now they filed for a reconsideration of the ruling.

“There is today no serious ground for the accusation that the Application is designed to confer ‘monopoly status’ on [OK Kosher] over ‘.kosher’ domain names and to permit [OK Kosher] to engage in ‘exclusionary practices’,” said an expert from the International Chamber of Commerce working under ICANN’s auspices.