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New Net Battle Over ".mobile" Looming

Posted by timothy on from the what-about-dot-family dept.

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."

6 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. .mobile why do we need another? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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..

  2. Ya know... by suso · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They don't need a .mobile domain to connect their phones and PDAs to the internet, don't they? ;-)

    Like it will matter, people will just continue to find unique domains and register stuff like

    myphonenumber.com
    myphonenumber.net
    myphonenum ber.org
    myphonenumber.biz
    myphonenumber.cc
    myph onenumber.tv
    myphonenumber.de
    myphonenumber.mx

    Because, what if, forbid, someone just randomly types in myphonenumber.mx, but doesn't try myphonenumber.com. Oh no!

  3. People are not used to this by Ich+Bin+Zu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. It's mostly marketing but it's a good idea by ChiralSoftware · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

  5. Re:add this to /etc/sendmail/access (Zombie PDAs) by G4from128k · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  6. And what about us small-timers? by Supp0rtLinux · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    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 .mobile root server possibly running on Windows???

    The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers