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."

Comments

It's mostly marketing but it's a good idea

[ChiralSoftware]

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...

Re:add this to /etc/sendmail/access (Zombie PDAs)

[G4from128k]

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.