Interesting opinion on a proposed .bank TLD.
Short story, a top level domain (.bank) would give banks and customers a more secure means of online banking, forcing verification of physical addresses and tying the ownership of the domain back to an actual charter (ok, the process is still up in the air… but that’s the gist of it). I’m not a fan. I ‘m not even a fan of the .biz, .info, and other “new” TLD’s. Why? I think the simplicity of the original domains worked just fine, and if controlled and used as intended, we wouldn’t have the mess we have now.
Long story:
.com, .net, .gov, .edu, .mil, .org plus the country specific extensions, like .uk, .ru, .jp made sense. A commercial company? You get a .com. A school? .edu for you. A non-profit? .org sounds great after nearly anything. I really don’t want to go down the road of “back in my day” but I have to. Domain registration used to be a standardized process, $35 and you registered the domain. The ability for anyone to register a domain caused problems, and the process of domain resellers also added to the confusion. Now anyone can register a domain, (any available domain) for only a few dollars.
Adding a new TLD won’t fix this. The process to register .bank could be just as diluted in a few years, there is no guarantee. It won’t really stop phishing or url obfuscation, someone with malicious intent could still set up a site with the url “bigbank.bank.phishanyway.com”
Tinfoil hat time: it’s because of “internet marketing”, “new media”, and the “first dot com boom” Marketers took a technical concept and forced it into marketing glitz. The purpose of a URL wasn’t so it could be turned into a business name. Anyone remember pets.com? (Eric’s pet peeve here- business that use url’s as the actual names of their businesses. Don’t get me started.) URL’s were simply a way to ease the confusion of IP addresses and a rational way to organize DNS records.
So do I have a better solution? Yes.
Strengthen the process to register a domain. Keep .org’s for provable non-profits, .com’s for businesses and require proof of such (a tax id, articles of incorporation etc.) Instill the process of verification to a physical address to domain registration. Use sub-domains. Yes, it’s a big world and there are more than one Third State Bank’s competing for the precious thirdstatebank.com. Creative URL’s could fix that. Well placed hyphens and underscores could too. But I digress.
What do you think? Would it be worth it to your organization to change all of it’s marketing, letterhead, embedded url’s, connections to vendors and everything else that has your .com to .bank?