Re: Re: Regional subdomains..
Agree, it also means that companies/sites using .bank.uk will be subject to UK legal oversight and not US legal oversight.
Remember, a loan to Iran to enable it to buy "peaceful nuclear technology" might satisfy UK/EU laws, but because a UK/EU company beat a US company to the battery supply deal, the US government (lobbied by the lossing US company) decides the whole deal is incontravention of US domestic law and so uses it's self-declared "ownership" of the non-national gTLD's to take control of the relevant .bank domain name...
Remember they have already done this recently with megaupload.com and prior to that various (UK-based) gambling .com's... We also shouldn't forget what happened to Systime in the mid-1980's [ http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1986/feb/25/systime-plc ]
Finally, I suspect that the banks themselves will prefer to use a country element in the domain name to enable better targetting: nationwide.bank.uk reads better than any of nationwide.uk.bank, uk.nationwide.bank or nationwide.bank/uk
However, because the US domestic market think of themselves as being the centre of the universe, the US banks will want .bank and not .bank.us