.Bank Has 6,000 Applications & A 97% Approval Rate

As of today, fTLD has received more than 6,000 applications for .bank domain names and approximately 5,400 have been approved for an approval rate of 97%.

The most common reason for a an application to be rejected is that the domain name applied for does not comply with fTLD’s Name Selection Policy (i.e., the name must correspond to a trademark, trade name or service mark of the entity requesting the domain name).

For example, fTLD has received requests for generic terms (e.g., mobile, digital) and when these are rejected they are added to fTLD’s Reserved Names list (see https://www.register.bank/reserved-names-list/). Early next week fTLD will post an update to its FAQ (https://www.register.bank/faq/) to provide more information on Generic and Reserved Names.

Request for Proposal (RFP) to Allocate Reserved Names

Pursuant to fTLD’s Reserved Names Challenge Policy, we have received and resolved challenges for the following domains: american, associated, mercantile, northwest and savingsinstitute. fTLD will allocate these five (5) domain names via one or more of the mechanisms outlined in the Name Allocation Policy, starting with an RFP. If there are multiple, qualified candidates for any domain name the contention will be resolved with an auction. The RFP is available at https://www.register.bank/request-for-proposal-rfp-to-allocate-reserved-names/ and responses are due by 22:00:00 UTC on 11/6/2015.

Updated Registry Policies

fTLD’s Advisory Council recently supported updates to several Registry Policies and/or their Implementation Guidelines and the Board of Directors approved them on August 28, 2015. The documents, available at https://www.register.bank/policies/ are:

1. Acceptable Use / Anti-Abuse Policy – to permit fTLD to impose use restrictions on registrants.
2. Name Selection Policy – to incorporate fTLD’s Acceptable Use / Anti-Abuse Policy.
3. Registrant Eligibility Policy (“REP”) – to clarify the implementation of the Service Provider category (Section 3.6 of the Policy).
4. Registration Eligibility Dispute Resolution Policy – to exclude challenges re: eligibility categories requiring Board approval (Sections 3.6 & 3.7 of the REP) and in relation to use restrictions and incorporate the Name Selection Policy into Section 3.3.

fTLD will soon conduct a survey of entities that have registered .BANK domains to understand at a high level their plans for implementing their new domain and what additional resources fTLD could provide to assist with that process. The registrant name and email address identified in the whois record for the entity is the person/group that will receive the survey. You can see this information for your organization by searching for the domain name at https://www.register.bank/whois/.

If your organization is interested in the .INSURANCE gTLD, fTLD anticipates it will be available late in Q1 2016.