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New Net Battle Over ".mobile" Looming
John IPsen writes "A group of big companies, including Nokia, Vodafone and Microsoft, today applied to ICANN to have a new ".mobile" domain in the next round of new Internet domains for connecting phones and PDAs to the Internet. But while they say they aren't aware of any competition, it seems that some others have been preparing their bids for a lot longer and a big battle may be brewing. More here."
Personally I dont think there needs to be another .anything right now. what good is .mobile gonna do? rather than be the next haven for spammers, stupid vhosts, and other useless junk..
They don't need a .mobile domain to connect their phones and PDAs to the internet, don't they? ;-)
m ber.orgh onenumber.tv
Like it will matter, people will just continue to find unique domains and register stuff like
myphonenumber.com
myphonenumber.net
myphonenu
myphonenumber.biz
myphonenumber.cc
myp
myphonenumber.de
myphonenumber.mx
Because, what if, forbid, someone just randomly types in myphonenumber.mx, but doesn't try myphonenumber.com. Oh no!
I don't know if it is a good idea. Our company website has the .ws domain. When I give people our website address, they always ask: dot what? becasue they always expect .com or .net.
These companies need to do anything they can do to get more mobile data use out of their networks, hardware and software. Margins on voice traffic are dropping and will continue to drop, hastened by VoIP, so how to make up for lost revenue? Pretty soon a large chunk of high-margin international calling traffic will be VoIP, which basically means flat rate, which means... no more big bucks for ATT, etc. By selling new services, like wireless data the carriers can save themselves (they hope). Another problem for Nokia and friends is that handsets are starting to be manufactured in China, and Nokia will not be able to build plain old voice handsets at competitive prices, so it needs to get away from the commoditized market of voice handsets, which means it needs better entertainment abilities, which means wireless data. A TLD could really fit into that. The wireless web has great potential but consumer awareness is poor, because there aren't any good ways for consumers to identify mobile content and there aren't any easy ways for websites to produce mobile content without learning a bunch of new technologies. Well, there are some ways to do it now...
Great, now spammers are going to create exploits for phones and PDAs as relays for their filth. I wonder how many e-mails a zombie Pocket PC can crank out before the the user sees a $10,000 for bandwidth usage? I guess the antivirus indusry will see a nice boost in revenues for AV for Blackberrys, Palms, PocketPCs, Symbian phones, etc.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
In europe, where this matters more, pretty much no-one calls a cell phone itself a "cell" (argh!) or "cell phone" - the normal short usage is "mobile", as in "What's your mobile?" [phone number...], or, more likely, "Whzy'rm'bile?" in that annoyingly fast pseudoAmerican that English people speak :-)
Screw that. Try ORSC instead. They have been around longer and they aren't crapware authors.
As the article points out, its 45K to apply and well over 1 million to complete the process and get everything setup. But what about the individual and openness? I for one would like my own personal andrew.mobile... or maybe even andrew.myisp.mobile. After all, I have number portability now. Why not also have domain portability in regards to my wireless equipment? Wouldn't it be nice to switch providers... whether of my 3G network or my 802.11b, but keep my andrew.myisp.mobile and my phone number?
.mobile root server possibly running on Windows???
Also... not sure how many others were bothered by the presence of M$ on the committee. Don't they have enough of their toes in enough industries? Now they want to be part of the control of the TLD for the mobile space??? Add up the net-worth of all the companies involved and M$ has the most $$$ which means they have the most strongarm potential. This isn't meant as a flame war, but rather a call for each of us to submit our opinions to ICANN about the presence of M$ (who isn't really a telco-type company... but just a software company) on the committee. If M$ is going to be onboard (as a s/w company), so should Trolltech and Palm and some of the other more *open* vendors who's software are also used in mobile devices. Otherwise, all I see is yet another entity that M$ can bully its way around, not to mention the fear of the
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
It wouldn't be too hard to have the phone/pda default to .mobile for the TLD. For example if you type in slashdot to your phone it would try slashdot.mobile and if you wanted to go to www.slashdot.org you could type www.slashdot.org
The author is probably one of those new-school, semi-computer-literate thinkers who has been slowly coaxed into believing that large corporations are wholly benign entities which have the public's best interests in mind. Many people nowadays seem to honestly believe that. They seem to believe the snazzy corporate slogans like "GE: We Bring Good Things to Life", and honestly believe that the megacorps are out to help humanity. (Ever been to EPCOT Center in Disneyworld? It's all about that "benevolent corporate sponsor" mindset-- "Ooh, look at all of these wonderful exhibits created by all of these wonderful corporations, who are working tirelessly to improve our world...") When, in reality, the big corps are pretty much out for their own interests, and (to a much lesser extent) the interests of the wealthy upper-class in general.
The general population allows corporations to do as they will precisely because they are under the impression that the corps are doing what's best for the general population!
Remember, a lot of people nowadays honestly believe that Microsoft invented the personal computer. Most Americans see Bill Gates (and any other wealthy and successful businessperson who they've heard of) as a hero. There is a lot of factual distortion (and bona-fide historical revisionism) and hero-worship going on in and around the computer field. Anyone who makes a lot of money is considered a role model, and is kinda just 'assumed' to be doing Good Things(TM) for all of humanity. Their good deeds are hailed forever, and their bad deeds are ignored or quickly forgotten.
Hell, I read one little rant online once whose thesis was basically "Without Microsoft, the Internet would only be used by the Military, and the only computers out there would be giant mainframes, also used by the Military and maybe Universities". The factual distortion inherent in such naive and fawning behaviour towards megacorps is extreme...
This seems to be the sort of mindset that would lead to the megacorps being able to do a land-grab on entire TLDs without anyone even giving a crud. If the megacorps are benign, and out to help humanity and improve the world, and if the big CEOs are heroes to all humankind-- why should anyone care?
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Abolish .com .org .net .biz etc .info and .name with a flame-thrower.
.com.us .org.us .com.uk
.us and ibm.com.uk if you are in the uk etc......
.com for the whole world
... still saying "all the cool domains are taken."
And terminate
Create
etc
Have, for example, ibm.com map to ibm.com.us if you are in the
The only reason me need more TLDs is because we have only 1
Make Pepsi register in every country they trade in.....
I can see it now, in the year 2050 when we live on mars and Europa
Type unto others as you would have them type unto you.
I mentioned this later, but my thoughts... Just use voice recognition /w DNS. Hit a button, "Call rahga at virgin mobile", call goes through....
You're right. Mind you, my phone and I assume numeruos others have shortcuts for .com, net. etc.
.5?
I propose the new TLD be easy on the keypads, how about
yahoo.5
sprintpcs.5
Nice and easy to type in, well, at least the TLD part of it.
You said it. To type out ".mobile" on my cell phone takes 16 keystrokes. And that's without the ever present fat fingering! You're look at 10-20 seconds just to tap out that extension.
Ideally, mobile phones should get special dispensations -- numeric-only URLs, no document extensions, etc. I've written a few WML apps, and the biggest challenge was making them easy to get to via the keypad. Something like tiny url -- concentrating on numbers and the letters a,d,g,j,m,p,t and w -- worked best.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
You have to realize that Llanfair PG created that name soley for the privelidge of having a very long name.
And regarding your sig as it currently is, Homer looks like Krusty because originally there was going to be some sort of plot about how Bart didn't respect his father, but respected a clown who looked just like him. Didn't pan out, but they kept the character.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Would the Internet have been the success it is if to visit this website I had to type slashdot.organization?