Effort to Give Banks New Domain Names Is an Uphill Battle

It's just a dot on the landscape, but right now the letters that come after it spell nothing but trouble.

By next year banks may start to shed the .com from their Web addresses and replace it with Web domains that end in .bank and are more descriptive of that institution's brand or mission. But this year turf wars, high expenses and the need for security standards stand between banks and their new URLs.

After initially expressing concerns over the expense of controlling the new domains, the American Bankers Association and the Financial Services Roundtable, which are operated by financial institutions, have jointly created fTLD Registry Services, a group tasked with submitting applications to ICANN for generic top line domains, or gTLDs, with the internet address endings .bank and .insurance.

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is a nonprofit organization that manages the allocation of domain names and IP addresses. ICANN is taking applications for new corporate-friendly domains designed to help with marketing, branding and security. The process can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, including a $185,000 registration fee and four-figure yearly outlays for quarterly fees, insurance and transaction costs.

The new domains "are the most dramatic change since the invention of the Internet," says Naseem Javed, founder of ABC Namebank, a branding company. "One of the significant changes that people will see is the exclusivity of what we call 'closed usage' of the particular domain name in question … when you get .bank and the subsets of that, they would be exclusively controlled by" the owners.

The ABA and the Roundtable have not disclosed who has invested in fTLD, but they have released a list of endorsements that provides a clue as to which banks and insurers are interested. It includes Allstate, BB&T, BBVA, Comerica, KeyCorp, PNC, Regions Bank, U.S. Bancorp, State Farm and banking trade groups in Canada, the U.K. and Australia.

"Endorsing means they support fTLD's application for .bank or insurance. Of course, we certainly hope they plan to purchase and use the domains," says Craig Schwartz, general manager for registry programs at BITS, a security division of the Financial Services Roundtable.

How the costs of the new domain registrations will be paid for and managed by the banks is still being worked out. Schwartz said that since pricing information for the domains is a competitive issue, it "is not something we would publicize until after fTLD had been awarded any gTLDs and until the launch plan is complete."

Other financial institutions have also applied for new domains on their own. According to ICANN's website, which tracks domain applications, the only other applicant for .bank is from Dotsecure, a unit of Radix. Radix, which manages Web registries, has also applied for a number of other corporate domains, such as .movie, .law, .doctor, and .hotel. Radix says its executives are in India, and could not comment by Tuesday afternoon.

Schwartz says the ABA and Financial Services Roundtable hope that by forming a .bank community, representatives of the banking industry will produce security protocols and standards. The two trade groups say they believe they can drastically reduce phishing, cybersquatting, lampooning and other misuse of bank websites.

"Nothing would wipe out every threat," Schwartz says, but the fact is that you can't use .bank for criminal purposes "because you can't register unless you are a legitimate member of the community."