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

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 30 May 2007 11:11

Your IT - Home IT

Twomey said that there was at present no formal process in place where  candidate TLDs could be notified to ICANN, but "people with their ear to the ground say they know of potentially 50 or 60 applications... and I suspect we wil get competing applications for certain strings."

Should a .bank name be created the issue of vetting applicants for .bank names would have to be addressed, and would be crucial to maintaining the integrity of the name. In general, Twomey said "We have a compliance system in place but it is complaints based." He added that organisations claiming inappropriate gTLDs " has not been a major issue so far."

For the .int gTLD (which is restricted to international organisations) ICANN relies on advice from the former senior legal counsel of the United Nations.

Twomey agreed that F-Secure's  arguments for the creation of the .bank domain had merit. "I think there is something in having a TLD that offers features that would limit the opportunities for phishing etc, but there is quite a bit of discussion as to what constitutes the financial service sector, and I think who is accrediting who and under what rules would be quite an issue."

However over and above the case for specific new gTLDs is the question of how many should be permitted.  There are at present around 260: 244 country specific ones (ccTLDs) and about 20 generic ones.

Twomey said. "The first question the policy development group was asked was 'do we need more TLDs?' but there is a policy to open up the top level domain space to more choice and competition.

"We are still waiting on input from security experts and others on how many we can handle. There has been mention of thousands but the limit today is probably more administrative than technical...The reality as that no matter how much we try and streamline the process each application for a TLD is different and there is a lot of procedural work involved."

Twomey added that ICANN was presently battling another challenge with gTLDs: there are already several longer that three letters - .aero, .coop, .info, .museum, .name.  .asia, and jobs, yet code writers do not always cater for anything longer than three letters.

"This is quite a big problem," Twomey said. "We have actually put onto our site a series of objects that developers can download to address this issue."