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.bank doing surprisingly well in sunrise

Kevin Murphy, June 11, 2015, 07:53:34 (UTC), Domain Registries

The forthcoming .bank gTLD has received over 500 applications for domains during its sunrise period, according to the registry.
fTLD Registry Services tweeted the stat earlier this week.


Its sunrise period doesn’t even end until June 17. Sunrise periods tend to be back-weighted, so the number could get a lot higher.
Five hundred may not sound like a lot — and applications do not always convert to registrations — but in the context of new gTLDs it’s very high.
Discounting .porn and .adult, both of which racked up thousands of names across their various sunrise phases, the previous high for a sunrise was .london, with just over 800 names registered.
It’s not unusual for a sunrise to get under 100 names. A year ago, I calculated that the average was 144.
The 500+ .bank number is especially surprising as it’s going to be a very tightly controlled gTLD where the chance of cybersquatting is going to be virtually nil.
All .bank registrants will be manually vetted to ensure they really are banks, substantially mitigating the need for defensive registrations.
Could this be an indication that .bank will actually get used?

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Comments (12)

  1. Mark says:
    June 11, 2015 at 12:28 pm

    Most of banks are not just banks, but they are institutions offering variety of financial related services, such as investment, insurances, etc. I see no reasonable arguments why any bank would move from .com to anything else. Especially when .com is the extension that 99+% of customers expect the bank would use.

    Reply
    • Kevin Murphy says:
      June 11, 2015 at 1:48 pm

      That might be true in the US, I don’t think it is elsewhere. Most British high street banks use .uk.

      Reply
    • Rob says:
      June 11, 2015 at 9:21 pm

      Mark, I think that the idea is to change the way people think about what is a valid TLD vs a phishing one.
      If banks are successful in educating customers that they ONLY exist in the .bank TLD, then it should protect consumers from phishing scams, as the .bank TLD is not available to anyone but banks.
      I know that if my bank were to tell me they are switching, that it is more secure, and that they will NEVER again use a domain other than .bank for security purposes and my safety, I would instantly become aware of .bank and look for it when on their site.
      Think of it as the little green bar, but even better.
      Rob.

      Reply
  2. Sally-anne says:
    June 11, 2015 at 12:46 pm

    I agree with mark, .com is a brand, TLDs make more sense as the product, it will be interesting to see if the purchases are redirects to the .com or active sites. (both now or in the future)… It will be interesting to see how other TLDs do that are more product based like .Forex or .CFD which i think are coming out later this year, exciting time.

    Reply
  3. Andrew Allemann says:
    June 11, 2015 at 1:34 pm

    I’m not that surprised. You get a few bank CIOs talking about the domain and then everyone in a fairly tight-knit industry gets on board.

    Reply
  4. Domenclature says:
    June 11, 2015 at 9:57 pm

    Let us recall that most newgtld optimists cired Google’s entry into the space as a bona fide reason to embrace the scheme. And it was a convincing one.
    Today we know that wasn’t a game changer for newgtld adoption.
    Now, 100% of those who used the Google argument are using the .brand one.
    I have saud that the worst thing that ciuld happen to the generic newgtld program is the success of the .brand ones. If the public is goaded to embrace dot brands on legitimacy and security grounds, then who in their right minds would use a generic TLD?

    Reply
    • Rubens Kuhl says:
      June 12, 2015 at 3:13 am

      As with poison and medicine, the question here is dosage. A moderate dose of brand gTLDs success will remove .com automatism from users, but still not reach the point of breaking trust in generic TLDs altogether.

      Reply
      • Domenclature says:
        June 12, 2015 at 4:36 am

        That’s a salient view.
        However, on the substantive issue of Security itself, there’s also the concern of banks entrusting sensitive data of their clientele to outside backroom operators.
        If these banks delegate the operation of these branded TLDs to secondary and tertiary outfits, then where’s the security?

        Reply
      • Domenclature says:
        June 12, 2015 at 5:44 am

        In essence, the banks, and the public, will be weighing two things:
        1. Verisign, a company entrusted by the US Government for over almost a generation now to run the US Military’s Internet Infrastructure, as well as the Zone files, and the entirety of educational, and commercial nexus of the thing, against some new guys with TLDs;
        2. Coping with a couple of wayward cybersquatters on their established .COM against delegating their sensitive data to a couple of guys with a brand TLD.
        These calculations are inevitable. I ask you, which would you choose, Kuhl?

        Reply
        • Rubens Kuhl says:
          June 12, 2015 at 12:40 pm

          New guys with TLDs can do a better job than Verisign in a lot of things, but the .bank registry runs on Verisign infrastructure, so I fail to see what difference you imagine between .bank and your garden variety legacy gTLDs.
          Also, sensitive data is not trusted to any registry whether in .com or new gTLDs, since PKI-based encryption is in place and no registry is in the data path of any registrant traffic.

          Reply
  5. Domenclature says:
    June 11, 2015 at 10:01 pm

    Auto correction of my phone butchered the comment. See what you can make out of it.

    Reply

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