.bbb Domain

Business accreditation and consumer trust services framed the .bbb application in ICANN's 2012 New gTLD Program. The rationale was unusually direct: an organization whose entire function is verifying that businesses are legitimate has an obvious interest in a namespace that cannot be imitated, since fake accreditation badges and bogus review pages are a standard component of online scams targeting small-business owners and consumers alike.

The application did not proceed to delegation. No registry agreement was ever signed, so the extension has never existed in the DNS root zone — a common outcome in the 2012 round, where a substantial share of applications were withdrawn before contracting. Strings in this position cannot be registered, and returning one to consideration would require a new ICANN application round.