VeriSign now front-runner for .bank
VeriSign has signed a deal with two major banking industry organizations to become their exclusive provider of registry services for any new top-level domains designed for financial services companies.
The deal is with the American Bankers Association and BITS, the technology policy arm of the Financial Services Roundtable. Together, they represent the majority of US banks.
While the announcement conspicuously avoids mentioning any specific TLD strings, .bank is the no-brainer. I suspect other announced .bank initiatives will now be reevaluating their plans.
The way ICANN’s new gTLD Applicant Guidebook is constructed, any TLD application claiming to represent the interests of a specific community requires support from that community.
There are also community challenge procedures that would almost certainly kill off any .bank application that did not have the backing of major banking institutions.
BITS has already warned ICANN that it would not tolerate a .bank falling into the wrong hands, a position also held by ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee.
In an era of widespread phishing and online fraud, the financial services industry is understandably eager that domains purporting to represent banks are seen to be trustworthy.
Because we all trust bankers, right?
VeriSign is of course the perfect pick for a registry services provider. As well as running the high-volume .com and .net domains, it also carries the prestige .gov and .edu accounts.
“We’re honored to have been chosen by BITS and ABA as their registry operator for any new gTLDs deployed to serve the financial services industry and their customers,” said Pat Kane, VeriSign’s senior VP of Naming Services, in a statement.
Apart from the multilingual versions of .com and .net, I think this may be the first new TLD application VeriSign has publicly associated itself with.
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