Scott Bush

Google’s (un)intelligent AdSense engine decided to show me an ad the other day. It encour­aged me to “exer­cise my right to eat freely,” and dis­played www.EatFreely.org as the URL. “That’s odd,” I thought, re-reading the ad. “There are the words ‘Hot Pock­ets®’ right there; how can this be an ad for a .org domain?” Take a look at the ad:

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear “Hot Pock­ets” is, of course, Jim Gaffigan’s hilar­i­ous stand-up bit from Beyond the Pale. Com­edy aside, I was intrigued by the use of a .org domain for some­thing asso­ci­ated with Hot Pock­ets. So I clicked and found myself look­ing at a very busy, ani­mated mar­ket­ing site for a fic­tional move­ment to “eat freely,” by which they mean the abil­ity to eat nasty meat stuffed inside a Pop Tart with­out hav­ing to be both­ered by incon­ve­niences like chairs and cutlery.

This was sur­pris­ing. I was under the appar­ently mis­taken notion that .org domains were the exclu­sive domain (ha, sorry for the pun) of non-profit and char­i­ta­ble organiza­tions. Hot Pock­ets’ schlocky mar­ket­ing site mas­querad­ing as such an orga­ni­za­tion imme­di­ately rubbed me the wrong way, much the same way actu­ally eat­ing a Hot Pocket rubs my tongue, esoph­a­gus, stom­ach, and intestines the wrong way. This trav­esty was sul­ly­ing the very name of rep­utable .org sites like Peo­ple for the Eth­i­cal Treat­ment of Ani­mals, the Amer­i­can Lung Asso­ci­a­tion, Boys & Girls Clubs of Amer­ica, and even SOTA : The Soci­ety of Typo­graphic Afi­ciona­dos.

As I researched the issue in prepa­ra­tion for my protest to ICANN, I dis­cov­ered this sad fact: Hot Pock­ets are not wrong. At least, not in the sense that their “eat freely” cam­paign site is hosted as a .org; they are wrong in every other sense of the word. The fol­low­ing text is stated on the Pub­lic Inter­est Reg­istry website

When you buy a .ORG, … You’re link­ing your orga­ni­za­tion — your cause — to a world­wide com­mu­nity of mission-driven orga­ni­za­tions that are try­ing to make the world a bet­ter place.

Through the reg­istry for .ORG, your orga­ni­za­tion is linked to a well-established brand of trust and integrity. One of the orig­i­nal top-level domains (TLDs), .ORG became the domain of choice for orga­ni­za­tions ded­i­cated to serv­ing the pub­lic inter­est, and today .ORG is con­sid­ered one of the most trusted domains on the internet.

Non­prof­its, foun­da­tions, phil­an­thropic and cul­tural insti­tu­tions, reli­gious, civic, arts, social and fra­ter­nal orga­ni­za­tions, health and legal ser­vices, clubs and com­mu­nity vol­un­teer groups… if yours is a non­com­mer­cial entity, peo­ple expect to find you in the .ORG community.

Appar­ently the Pub­lic Inter­est Reg­istry has no prob­lem with a brand­ing site for hand-held processed food prod­ucts also obtain­ing a .org domain.

I turned to the font of all true knowl­edge (Wikipedia) for the truth and was sad to read this:

Although .org was rec­om­mended for non-commercial enti­ties, there are no restric­tions to reg­is­tra­tion. There are many instances of .org being used by com­mer­cial sites. .org was also com­monly rec­om­mended for use by indi­vid­u­als, although .name and .info are now alternatives.

(Empha­sis mine.)

So there you have it: any­one can reg­is­ter a .org. That means a lit­tle extra vig­i­lance is required on our part when research­ing things online. Maybe ViagraRules.org or HappyNapsWithAmbien.org aren’t dis­pens­ing unbi­ased infor­ma­tion after all? Caveat brow­sor, I suppose.

In all seri­ous­ness, though, online cam­paigns such as “eat freely” are only going to become more preva­lent. Is the way in which these cam­paigns are branded some­thing we, as con­sumers, should care about? Every ad agency out there is hop­ing to pitch the next Will it Blend phe­nom­e­non (note they appro­pri­ately used a .com domain), and it’s likely that we’ll see more of them wrapped up in .org domains. Sure, it’s unlikely any­one would mis­take EatFreely.org as any­thing but adver­tis­ing. But as I attempted to show with my humor­ous exam­ples above, not all .org domains may be as inno­cent. Drug– or agri­cul­tural prod­ucts com­pa­nies may reg­is­ter a .org domain and put up a site that has all the somber “author­ity” of a gov­ern­ment or true organization’s site, but present only pos­i­tive infor­ma­tion about their prod­ucts while obscur­ing their dangers.

With other top-level domains (TLDs) like .net and recent addi­tions like .name, .info, .biz, etc. there seems lit­tle jus­ti­fi­ca­tion in using .org domains to pro­mote or sell prod­ucts. Reg­is­ter­ing a .org domain should require proof of non-profit 503© or char­i­ta­ble sta­tus (or their equiv­a­lents out­side the U.S.) to com­bat this trend.

But in a sense, I sup­pose Hot Pock­ets have made “the world a bet­ter place” for some. Just ask Jim Gaffi­gan.