There are probably some variations based on the zone, languages, IDN'ability, etc., but it certainly is a good idea to be bankofamerica.* for reasons that I think are obvious to most of us.
To make it hard for your customers to figure out whether a URL is legitimately owned by the bank? To make it easier for evil guys to steal from your customers by registering bonkofamerica.*? Back to language examples. It would be perfectly legitimate for BBC.ru to be owned by someone other than the well-known broadcaster because in Russian, BBC is the abbreviation for the air force. Probably this applies even more to BBC.aero. IMHO things work better when you have a home TLD and then only use other TLDs when it relates to your business operations. For instance example.com is the home TLD, example.net is used by their consumer broadband division, example.co.uk by their UK sales branch and example.cn by their manufacturing division in Shanghai. --Michael Dillon