It’s Just Not .KOSHER – Jewish Groups Battle Over gTLD

Battles over who gets the opportunity to operate certain new gTLDs has been quite combative for a few, and one in particular is the .kosher application.

While there was only one applicant for .kosher, a subsidiary of OK Kosher, Kosher Marketing Assets LLC, which certifies more than 500,000 products and offices around the world, it drew criticisms from a number of Jewish organisations such as the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, STAR-K Kosher Certification Inc. (STAR-K), Chicago Rabbinical Council (cRc), Kosher Supervision Service Inc. (KOF-K) and the Kashruth Council of Canada (COR) reported Haaretz.

However, Rabbi Moshe Elefant, chief operating officer of OU Kosher, made clear in an interview with the Jewish Journal on 23 January that he still had doubts about how OK Kosher would use the newly delegated gTLD.

“We don’t believe that any one group should have control over the word ‘kosher,’ Elefant told the Jewish Journal. “If one kosher certifying agency has control over which businesses could obtain Web addresses ending in .kosher, he said, any business that wanted to have such a presence on the Web would be forced to sign up with OK Kosher.”

But according to the report “an expert working for the International Chamber of Commerce rebuffed this objection and awarded the right to manage .kosher” to OK Kosher “on 14 January concluding that there was no proof that it would have a negative impact reported the Jewish Journal.

“Competitors claim OK Kosher would use the domain to attain an unfair competitive advantage in the kosher certification business, but the International Chamber of Commerce rejected their objection,” reported Haaretz.

“OK Kosher’s head of public relations, Rabbi Chaim Fogelman, told the Jewish Journal that the company is not yet sure what it will do with the new domain, but it will be in line with their mission of “kosher without compromise.”

But there is a background to the battle over the rights to .kosher. “There’s a long history of intense rivalry — but also cooperation — between kosher certifiers in the United States,” reported the Jewish Journal. “Today, a consumer food product may have only one kosher symbol on its package, but it’s likely that its ingredients are certified by different agencies.”

That balance between competition and cooperation is a delicate one, and this dispute could push that system in one way or another, Timothy Lytton, a professor at Albany Law School whose book “Kosher: Private Regulation in the Age of Industrialized Food” was published last year. Gaining control over .kosher could give OK Kosher increased Internet traffic, he said.

“If that could be translated into greater market control or greater control over public understanding of kosher standards, that might push [the American system of kosher certification] in the direction of centralised control,” he said.

And while there is an application fee of $185,000 to apply for a gTLD, and many other costs, those opposing the bid spent around $100,000 on fees to ICANN and lawyers. And they could spend more to appeal the decision.

Elefant told the Jewish Journal that when news of OK’s application to take control of .kosher reached him at the OU in late 2012, it was a surprise.

“We were never informed by OK of their application,” he said. “We happened to find out — and religious Jews don’t like to use this word — coincidentally.”

Before they took their objection to ICANN, though, the OU, together with the four other agencies, approached OK Kosher according to the report. A meeting was held in January 2013 to see if some kind of mutually acceptable agreement could be reached.

But if the OU’s preference was for no agency to own the gTLD .kosher, OK Kosher took a different attitude. Fogelman said the .kosher gTLD has “enormous potential to spread kosher and educate about kosher.” Furthermore, Fogelman believes there is a danger to leaving the .kosher gTLD on the table.

“Allowing it to be directed by people who are either not qualified or have ulterior motives for managing .kosher has the potential for great disaster,” he said.