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By Sally Watson, 20 November 2000 19:00

NEWS According to Shaun Fensom, founder and chairman of UK-based cooperative internet service provider Poptel, the move by the internet naming authority will encourage consumers to trust not-for-profit group buying sites. He said: "Cooperatives have never really had a space on the internet. They're not really a dot-com because they're not for profit, but they're not really a dot-org either because they're not a non-commercial organisation. "The cooperative principal works incredibly well with the internet," he added. "You can almost describe the internet as one giant cooperative." According to US organisation, the National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA), there are over 725,000 cooperatives worldwide, with a total of 720 million individual members. The domain will be strictly limited to applicants that adhere to cooperative principals, something Poptel and the NCBA hope will lend credibility and encourage consumer trust. "Increasingly, its been shown that people trust cooperatives more than conventional business," Fensom told silcion.com. "And some businesses have been trying to pass themselves off as cooperatives when they have no right." Limiting the applicants for top-level domains may be one of the few ways to stop businesses buying up all available choices. Of the seven new domain names only dot-info is unrestricted, allowing any user or company to register. Poptel was one of seven winners of last week's controversial domain name selection process. Icann has come under heavy criticism after seemingly obvious suggestions like dot-shop and dot-health were left off the list. Poptel and the NCBA will also establish a 'digital divide' fund to help limited resource cooperatives in developing countries do business online.