A minimum of 36 financial TLD applications are aiming to get a “dotBANK” name approved by ICANN. Besides the community-based “.BANK” string applied for by ABA/BITS and its rival application from dotSecure, a number of strings ranging from .UBANK to .NETBANK are more or less trying to achieve the same. Most applicants play safe, by using their companies and already established brand names, like BARLAYS, ICBC, EVERYBANK, PICTET or ANZ. Most surprising: PayPal Inc. is not applying for the .PAY string, which is nonetheless applied for by a Russian funded Swiss entity. PayPal pushes the string “.SOFTBANK”, stemming from its Japanese partner. Here is a list of  36 banking related finTLDs we identified from ICANN’s  disclosure on June 13th, 2012.

A smashing letter sent to ICANN by the European Banking Authority with concerns of regulators about a .bank or .fin application reveals horrifying
lack of understanding of the internet and ICANN process – not only that .fin is a no-go string (Finland), they have obviously never spoken to the parties concerned.

Dan Bernstein’s DNSCurve. More at: http://dnscurve.org/

The objective of the EU Green Paper is to launch a broad-scale consultation process with stakeholders. dotPay will be presented by CORE, pls mailto:secretariat@corenic.org

The World Wide Web was made possible by the invention of the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier, sometimes incorrectly referred to as “URL” for Uniform Resource Locator). A URI contains in a single line the information that leads to a target. Prior to the invention of the URI, instructions for access to an internet resource required several lines of prose.

There are two common paradigms for remote payments: “pull” and “push”. Pull is used for checks, bills of exchange, credit cards and debit authorizations. Push is used for postal and bank wire payments, as well as modern instant payment systems like PayPal.

The “.GIRO” or “.PAY” Internet Top-Level Domain (TLD) is proposed as a specialized naming infrastructure to facilitating bank wire transfers internationally. It enables bank and postal account holders to publish memorable provider-independent account identifiers and to determine routings.