The Swedish Post and Telecom Agency, which monitors the electronic communications and postal sectors in Sweden, has decided to take an unusual and surprising step when it comes to the registration of domain names ending in .SE. From now on it is illegal to register any .SE domain that contains the word “bank” without prior consent. In other words, unless you have a good reason, for example, you are actually a bank, you won’t be able to register a domain name with the word in.At the moment this is just a declaration from the PTS to the .SE domain, but it has yet to be seen whether the new rules will be adhered to. It does cause some problems if, for example, you want to run a site about banks, your company name has the word bank in it, or your name contains the word bank and you want to register a site using it. In some cases it is going to be seen as totally unfair to refuse such a registration.PTS are implementing this rule as a way of protecting the word, and therefore the use of it as a website, supposedly to cut malicious activity. But there is also a worry that if the rule is adhered to it will eventually be expanded to include other words further cutting the number of usable domains that can be registered.You can read the translated notice on the matter on the PTS website.
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