Since 2011, the banking and insurance industries have been advocating for industry control over the generic top level domain (gTLD) names .bank and .insurance, to assure the integrity of the naming process as the number of available domain names is expected to expand by approximately 2,000 new designations.
It’s been a multilayered process. In May 2012, Ftld Registry Services LLC applied to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for purview over .bank and .insurance. In the ensuing years, fTLD has emerged as the applicant likely to be awarded these gTLDs and currently anticipates launching them between approximately between fourth quarter 2014 and first quarter 2015, according to its request for proposals for bidders to provide credential verification services for prospective domain-name registrants seeking .bank and .insurance gTLDs. This measure is meant to deter rent-seeking cyber-squatters from holding the sites for ransom – or, worse, having the sites fall into the hands of cyber-criminals and phishers.
The American Bankers Association recommends that its member banks muster marketing and IT staff to acquire domain names, or permutations thereof.
This topic may not be on the radar screen of smaller banks right now, but they should be thinking about brand identity, as well as cyber-security, and buy up their relevant domain names before it’s too late.
It’s a double-edged sword. Buying a domain name with your company’s name as a suffix can protect your brand, but the flood of other new domain names coming online opens up more opportunities for cyber-fraudsters and phishers to ensnare unwitting customers who don’t read the full URL, which is more of us than we’d like to think.
Probably no bank leaders or their boards of directors wants to be seen as missing out on an opportunity to protect their brands – particularly under the stricter criteria of enterprise risk management, which will hold leadership more accountable for not making optimum decisions, including brand management. Staking your domain-name claim can have many downstream benefits, such as where the organization shows up in browser searches, and eliminating customer confusion.
Culturally, we’re probably just about as ready for the domain name explosion as the general population was two generations ago when area codes were introduced to landlines – which is to say, we didn’t like them, until they became second nature. Today, we don’t really know how we’re going to react, but we’ll have to adjust. Area code implementation was the first shot fired in the digital age, and it was, at the time, to landlines what broadband became to dialup 30 years later. Then came Twitter and the smartphone. Each new technology was first disruptive, and then became must-have.
An expanded domain name base is sure to be disruptive. It’s good to know that the banking and insurance sectors will be able to exercise some control over their part of what otherwise is probably going to be the Wild West of the Internet.
