Bible societies consider digital expansion

Huge investment will create .bible extension for web use

By Aaron Epp  |  Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Photo by Marcie Casas via Flickr

The American Bible Society (ABS) is developing a new Internet URL extension called ".bible" that it hopes will help make God's Word available to more people in a way that fits their digital lives.

ABS has submitted an application to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) —the company charged with regulating what goes to the right of the dot in a web address—to create the extension.

It is a detailed and expensive undertaking that requires, apart from legal and developmental costs, an application fee of $185,000 USD. The ABS believes the investment is worth it, though. It will also facilitate efforts by faith-based groups, including the Canadian Bible Society (CBS) and the other 145 members of the United Bible Society, to make God's Word available to countless people in new, digital ways.

The CBS is not contributing money toward the application, but hopes to use the URL extension if the application is approved.

Ted Seres, national director of the CBS, notes that if the application is approved, the ABS would have some say over who can use the .bible tag and who cannot. With Internet users expected to double to more than three billion in the next four years, the .bible domain will also make millions of additional URLs possible.

"We'll have the opportunity to register ourselves as CanadianBibleSociety.bible … [and] it will just help in branding what we do," Seres says. "And when people think of where to go on the web, certainly putting .bible behind something will help our cause instead of using .com or .ca."

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