Swedish Regulators Ban Word "Bank" In Domain Names For Non-Banks

It seems that Swedish regulators have decided to extend the requirement of not calling yourself a bank to the registration of domain names. Now anyone that tries to register a .SE domain name with the word "bank" in it will need to prove they are a legitimate bank. Hopefully there are no blood banks or anyone with the last name of "Banks" that might want a .SE domain. Here is a Google translation of the demand issued by the authorities to the .SE registry.

Re:Easier solution - *.bank.se

[mx_mx_mx]

It won't work

You will get, just

www.bankofsweden.me.se
And nobody will notice.

I bet that even a
www.bankofsweden.yahoo.com will fool most of stupid users

But if they actually ban anything with word 'bank' it might at least help a bit

Rob A. Bank

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

A friend of mine is named Robert A. Bank or "rob a bank". It's true. Good thing he isn't Swedish.

2000+ domains with bank in the name in .se

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

There are over 2000 domains with "bank" as part of their name in the .se-domain - most of them are not banks in the traditional we-take-care-of-your-money banks. One example is platsbanken.se which is the national goverment register of open jobb.

And strangely enough some of the real big banks don't use bank in their domain name.

I know from several involded in the NIC .SE they dont like this at all and intend to fight it. Actually this is something that has been pushed by the banks for several years but became more prominent because of well-published fishing-scams against the banks - which actually managed to steal some money. The 'fun' part is that the fishing attempts didn't use .se domain names but domain names in other TLDs.

Tracing who created an .SE domain is easier then for other TLD so we probably will never see anyone trying to use the .SE TLD for fishing scams against the banks. So PTS - the national post and telphone goverment overseer - are pushing an agenda that won't really had help against the fishing attempts.

So this is nothing that are decided - yet. It will be a battle between PTS and NIC .SE over who decide over domain names.

Holy sensationalist summary, Batman!

[Kidbro]

The press release [www.pts.se] (Swedish) from PTS (the regulating body referred to) makes it clear that the word is banned unless for banks or if it is otherwise clear that the name in question can not lead to misunderstandings.

A little more information than what you can get from the summary, TFA or the contentless blog rant TFA links to.

Re:Why is everyone assuming they use...

[HonIsCool]

English is not a romance language either. Both English and Swedish are Germanic languages, and Swedish does use 'bank' in the manner suggested (blodbank = blood bank, pantbank = pawn shop, platsbank = jobs available etc). It's not a bad point that different languages don't necessarily correspond in usage though.

Read the f***ing underrättelse

[Anonymous Coward]

FI har framhållit att ordet bank i domännamn endast bör få förekomma om det är fråga om sådan reglerad verksamhet som omfattas av 1 kap. 9 LBF eller om det klart framgår att ordet bank används i betydelsen förråd och sammansättningen inte kan leda till missförstånd.

Translated to English (Google Translate removed a negation, as it always does with every damn negation when it translate from Swedish; Google Translate is really dangerous, some day someone will start a war because of it):

FI has pointed out that the word bank in the domain name should only be allowed to happen in the case of such regulated activities covered by Chapter 1. 9 LBF or if it is clear that the word bank is used in the sense of stores and that the composition can't lead to misunderstandings

There have been a lot of fake bank sites in Sweden during a couple of years, with names similar to existing banks. If you read the full document (in Swedish, not googledygook) it is pretty clear that they only want to have the word bank included in the list of words in domain names that need to be verified by a human before approval.