A battle to control the word “kosher” in Internet addresses
is pitting Jewish groups against each other to determine whether a food
prepared under ancient strictures should have a new marketplace online.
The Internet’s organizing body, called Icann, is meeting
this week in the South African port city of Durban to begin a major expansion
of domain names. That may include a decision on who can operate and license
“dot-kosher” as a suffix for Web addresses, the same way “dot-com” and
“dot-net” are used.
Five organizations have banded together to oppose the sole
applicant for dot-kosher, Kosher Marketing Assets, saying it seeks to profit
from a sacred tradition that shouldn’t be over-commercialized. The two sides,
which both are in the business of certifying food as kosher, are at odds over
how Internet users will find such products in the future.
“We think that if the term ‘kosher,’ which has important
meaning in the Jewish religion, is commercialized, it will do a disservice to
how religion in general should be treated and will harm the kosher public
specifically,” said Harvey Blitz, the Kashruth Commission chairman of the Union
of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, one of the five groups. The New
York-based organization oversees OU Kosher, the world’s largest certification
agency.
Kosher Marketing Assets is a unit of OK Kosher
Certification, a Brooklyn, New York-based competitor to OU Kosher. Rabbi Don Yoel
Levy, OK Kosher’s CEO, said he never intended to control the potential domain
name unilaterally and said he was open to working with the five groups -- the
Orthodox Union, STAR-K Kosher Certification Inc., Chicago Rabbinical Council
Inc., the Kashruth Council of Canada, and Kosher Supervision Service Inc.,
better known as the KOF-K.
$17 Billion Market
Products that are certified kosher include breakfast cereals
like Kellogg Co. (K:US)’s Rice Krispies as well as traditional Jewish food like
matzo. The size of the market for food deliberately bought because it is kosher
is expected to reach about $17 billion this year, according to Packaged Facts,
a market-research firm.
Exclusive control of the domain name could give its owner
sway over the kosher supply chain, said Larry Finkel, director of food research
at Packaged Facts.
“It’s like losing access if you’re not tying into that
domain,” Finkel said in an interview. “It’s sort of like being excluded from
Wal-Mart.”
‘Rigorous Certification’
Icann -- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers -- began accepting applications for generic top-level domain names, or
gTLDs, in January 2012. In November, Kosher Marketing Assets, the OK Kosher
unit, filed an application for dot-kosher, with a mission to “promote kosher
food certification in general, and OK Certification and its clients in
particular.”
While only clients who pass “rigorous certification” tests
would be allowed to use the gTLD, OK Kosher said in its application it expected
to have more than 600 licensees by its third year of operation. OK Kosher
supervises products including Fruity Pebbles cereal and Maxwell House coffee.
Applying for a gTLD doesn’t come cheap, at close to $200,000
including the evaluation fee and legal services, OK Kosher’s Levy said in a
telephone interview.
No Agreement
Blitz of the Orthodox Union, which provides kosher
certification to items like Duncan Hines cake mixes and StarKist Tuna, said his
group had no advance notice of OK Kosher’s bid and moved to block it as soon as
it learned of the application. While it’s true his organization charges a fee
for certification, “we got into this to make kosher food available,” not as a
commercial pursuit, Blitz said.
“We were concerned by the language in the application,”
which stated that a single agency would have the right to grant use of the
kosher domain name, Avrom Pollak, the president of Star-K and also a rabbi,
said in an interview.
A meeting between the two sides produced no agreement. OK’s
Levy says he invited the groups to join his organization in overseeing the
dot-kosher domain name.
“They weren’t interested,” Levy said. “They don’t have to
become our partners, but they can’t now complain we’re trying to brazenly
control dot-kosher.”
The dispute marks a departure from past cooperation.
Individual ingredients comprising a food product, may, for example, be certified
by any one of the organizations and then combined into one final product that
is certified by only one.
READ MORE AT: Businessweek
No comments:
Post a Comment