FIBA, the international basketball federation, has become the second governing body in as many days to announce it is in the process of applying to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to acquire its sport-specific domain name.

FIBA has submitted an application for the .basketball generic top-level domain in a bid to protect the sport and the interests of its stakeholders.

Patrick Baumann, FIBA secretary general, said: "The decision to apply for .basketball is fully aligned with FIBA's mission to unify the basketball community, along with the promotion and development of our sport.

"This domain name concerns our 213 national federations as well as all other basketball stakeholders worldwide."

The International Rugby Board, rugby union's governing body, yesterday announced it had submitted a similar application for the .rugby domain name.

Earlier this year, SportAccord, the umbrella body of international sports federations previously known as GAISF, applied to ICANN to acquire the internet domain name suffix, ‘.sport.’

ICANN has opened the application process in order to expand the availability of domain names to the public sector beyond the present 22 domain endings, such as .net, .com, .org and .de, to include almost any word in any language.

Sportcal