The creation of an .xxx domain for websites has drawn the lion's share of attention as the Internet continues to expand. But among the faith-based website endings hoping to join .com and .org in URLs, it looks like .bible will be one of the first to hit the market.
The American Bible Society (ABS) announced today that it will "facilitate the addition of countless web addresses" by offering .bible as a new top-level domain (TLD). The move by the nearly 200-year-old society, pending the finalization of a contract with the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), hopes to "accelerate global online Bible access and facilitate engagement in ways not previously possible."
"This is the Bible's moment to move from Gutenberg to Google," said Doug Birdsall, president of ABS, in a press release.
"The goal of making the Bible more accessible has inspired innovation since the 1400s when the printing press was created," said Scott Wennermark, ABS's director of strategic advancement, in the same release. "So it is not surprising that the Bible would continue to be pushing progress."
New .bible websites should be available in 2015. ABS will limit such domain names to those "who have a healthy respect for the Bible."
Meanwhile, LifeChurch.tv (whose YouVersion Bible app has surpassed 100 million downloads) is seeking approval to offer a .church domain, but faces competition from Donuts Inc., a for-profit domain name registry. Applicants paid a $185,000 fee to ICANN.
Other faith-based words seeking approval as TLDs include .catholic, .cbn, .christmas, .faith, .mormon, .halal, .islam, .yoga, and .kosher.
