Pub. 7 2012-2013 Issue 2

July/August 2012 11 Extraordinary Service for Extraordinary Members. T HIRTEEN COMPANIES, INCLUDING Amazon and Google, are going after .app. Seven companies want .love, 12 are pursuing .home or .homes, and one hopes for .unicorn. The American Bankers As- sociation and the Financial Services Roundtable have applied for .bank on behalf of the financial services community—an initiative endorsed by, among others, the Independent Community Bankers of America, Brit- ish Bankers’ Association, European Banking Federation, Australian Bank- ers Association, and the International Banking Federation. Only one other applicant, Radixreg- istry, filed an application for .bank. This company was formed to apply for 31 separate top level domains—which suggests its interest hasmore to dowith running a large number of domains than concentrating solely on making the Internet safer for banking. ABA and the Roundtable, by contrast, filed what is known as a “community-based” application, which if accepted on that basis would give our application prior- ity during the evaluation process. Why should your bank care about this new rash of domain names or our .bank initiative? If you’re like most of the bankers we talk to about this subject, you already have your web presence established. But once you were alerted to the potential for a .bank domain, you asked us to protect it, recognizing that only trusted repre- sentatives of the financial services com- munity should control the operations of financial domains. The majority of you who responded to our banker survey on this issue also told us that you would like to have a presence in .bank, and would reorient your marketing and Internet banking efforts toward .bank. ICANN has trumpeted this domain- name expansion as a way to benefit con- sumersby increasingcompetitionamong registries. But early on ABA saw the potential for this influx of new domain names to also create a flood of oppor- tunities for scammers, cyber squatters, phishers, and other fraudsters. That’s why ABA and the Roundtable formed fTLD Registry Services to pre- pare and file our application for .bank. If we are successful, fTLD will operate the .bank domain on our industry’s behalf, including overseeing the reg- istration process to ensure applicants meet the standards of integrity and security that our industry demands and our customers expect. ABA’s advocacy efforts over anumber of years succeeded in convincing ICANN that financial domains require higher security standards—and it has pointed to the31 recommendationswe submitted in concert with the Roundtable back in 2011 as anexampleof the level of security expected for financial domains. Still, no one can or will protect bankers’ interests the way we can. The Internet may not recognize borders; however, when it comes down to who will control .bank, bankers must define and protect their territory. You can help by submitting a comment to ICANNen- dorsing our .bank application. It is easy to do. Contact ABA’s Doug Johnson at djohnson@aba.com to find out how. Z Washington Update The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently announced the 1,930 applicants for new generic top-level domain names (gTLDs) that range from .aaa to .zulu. (A top-level domain is the text to the right of the final “.” in a URL, such as .com, .org, or .net.) Can You Dot- Bank on It? Frank Keating , President & CEO, American Bankers Association Reach Frank Keating by email at fkeating@aba.com.

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTM0Njg2