F-Secure wants .bank gTLD to cut fraud and scams

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 30 May 2007 10:11

Your IT - Home IT

Finnish computer security company, F-Secure, is lobbying for the creation of a new generic top level domain name (gTLD) whose use would be strictly limited to bona-fide banks and financial institutions as a means of reducing online fraud and scams. However ICANN president, Paul Twomey, says the organisation is still putting in place the policies and procedures to consider applications for any new gTLDs.

Banks today use either the .com or their country-specific top level domain names such as .com.au and these are, for most countries, very easy and cheap to obtain making is simple for criminals to use names that appear to be genuine bank domain names, such "bankofamerica-online.com".

In an article published in the latest issue of "Foreign Policy" magazine, Mikko Hypponen F-Secure's chief research officer argues that "The creation of a new domain for a specific industry is not unprecedented: We've already done it for museums, with their restricted ".museum" top-level domain. If we can manage to protect storehouses of precious works of art from the Internet's most shameless thieves, surely we can find a way to protect our money."

According to one report. F-Secure has renewed its campaign for the introduction of a .bank domain and is seeking a sponsoring organisation that is willing to promote the domain as part of ICANN's public consultation on possible new top-level domains (TLDs)."

However ICANN president, Dr Paul Twomey, told iTWire that the review currently underway is about policies and procedures and is not considering any request for specific gTLDs.

"We are putting people on notice that there might be an opening of the TLD application space in the first quarter of the next calendar year. The policy development work by ICANN is starting to come to a conclusion. We have a big policy meeting in Puerto Rico at the end of June where I expect that process will conclude."

He added: "We will then have to do more work on implementation issues an that will probably take most of the rest of the year."