Sharing proceeds, governance with enviro community key, say social entrepreneurs.

Big Room's Jacob Malthouse and Trevor Bowden saw years ago how an Internet suffix could support and even transform a global environmental community.

For the past six years, two business partners laboured in their small office in Vancouvers Chinatown, chipping away at a goal that might have seemed nothing more than a punctuation point and three letters.

The dream, for Trevor Bowden and Jacob Malthouse, was control of a new domain -- one named .eco.

On Tuesday, they grasped the prize.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, the U.S.-based body that decides which Internet domain names can exist and who can administer them, gave .eco to Big Room, the company formed by Bowden and Malthouse.

If you are wondering how they won and what it means, so did I. In the clean confines of Matchstick Coffee on East Georgia, I met with the two digital entrepreneurs and got a fast lesson in why .eco represents not only a potentially endless revenue stream but a new tool for mapping who is green and who isn't.

The first thing (once we had our elaborately crafted coffees in hand) that Bowden and Malthouse made clear is that their gaining the rights to .eco really means that the global environmental community won the day.

Unlike their competitors, Big Room pledged to formally involve eco groups in deciding who will be able to use .eco in their internet addresses, and what .eco will come to signify. It was hardly a sure thing.

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How Vancouver Team Won Control of .eco Empire (in News)