The RSLC says it will put the revenue from websites back into 'party-building activities.' GOP gets set to unveil '.gop'

Republicans are moving one step closer to claiming unique territory on the Internet: Websites that end in “.gop.”

The Republican State Leadership Committee, a group that focuses on electing Republicans to state-level offices, won custody of the domain in the spring after an Internet governing body invited groups to vie for hundreds of new domains.


Now, in a plan first shared with POLITICO, the committee is soliciting information from Republicans interested in having .gop sites. It is operating on an internal timeline that would allow those sites to get up and running by the first quarter of 2014.

( Also on POLITICO: App grades companies on their political bent)

“At the RSLC, we do pride ourselves on trying to look a little further down the road and take a longer view of things,” Chairman Ed Gillespie said in an interview, citing work the committee already does to recruit local candidates who may rise into the ranks of the national party one day. “I think we’re well positioned for that.”

The domain project fits into that vision, Gillespie said, because it can potentially “foster a broader sense of community” for Republicans on the Internet and boost GOP branding through sites such as news.gop or polling.gop.

Most people and groups seeking sites with .gop domains will be able to register them in “real time,” said President Chris Jankowski in a statement. “But certain names that are especially relevant to our community are subject to a different process for registration which is standard industry practice.”

Those premium sites – register.gop and jobs.gop are two possibilities – won’t be doled out on a first-come, first-served basis. Rather, the committee says it will seek to find the right custodian for those sites, to take the lead on developing them, or to forge partnerships between multiple Republican groups to manage them.

And the committee is developing a process to screen out mischief-makers who don’t actually represent Republican groups or candidates.

“There’ll be a process,” Gillespie said. “We don’t want people who are actually interested in harming the Republican Party [to get] a .gop, or people who espouse views that are antithetical to the party, or contrary to the United States for that matter, or offensive in terms of how they would operate it. So yeah, there is an element of control here.”

The committee said it has met with an array of other Republican committees and bloggers and, while it hasn’t asked for commitments from them to move their sites yet, the project got an enthusiastic response.

“We’re really happy that our party, under the leadership of the RSLC, is taking part in this new digital era,” said Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski in an email. “We will be working closely with RSLC and others in our party to make this successful.” The National Republican Senatorial Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee echoed those comments.

A Republican Governors Association spokesman said group officials “will take a good look at” using the new domain name.

As with the process for registering sites on many other domains, there are fees attached. RSLC says it will put the revenue back into “party-building activities.”

The Republicans aren’t the first politicos to get into the domain-name game. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in July that the city had snagged “.nyc,” which will be used to “show that a business or individual is located in New York City and identify products and organizations serving the New York City community.”

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, a counterpart to RSLC on the left, said it hasn’t done anything similar – and took a shot at the Republican efforts.

“We are working to elect Democrats to state legislatures, not desperate rebranding strategies,” spokesman Dan Roth said in a statement.

The Democratic National Committee doesn’t “have any announcements to make on this front,” spokesman Michael Czin said in an email.

The Internet-wide domain expansion project began in 2012 and falls under the authority of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. There have been delays, but RSLC says it feels comfortable with providing the first-quarter 2014 timeline based on signals from other applicants and industry experts, as well as the dwindling number of steps it needs to complete before the launch.

Gillespie said that RSLC jumped at the chance to secure the .gop domain.

“We didn’t make a big deal of it, we didn’t talk to anybody about it, we just kind of went and did it and lo and behold, no one else had,” he said. “We thought it was very important that [an] official, responsible Republican entity had control of it.”