Brad Templeton On New Mobile Domains

nfocus writes "CircleID has an opinion piece by Brad Templeton, Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, offering an interesting follow up to the previous discussions here on Slashdot: New Net Battle Over ".mobile" Looming. Brad suggests that 'the only way to get a competitive innovative space is to slowly get rid of the generics and allow a competitive space of branded TLDs for resale. .yahoo, .dunn, .yellowpages, .google, .wipo, and a hundred other branded resellers competing on even footing to create value in their brand and win customers with innovative designs, better service, lower prices and all the usual things. I presume .wipo would offer trademark holders powerful protections within their domain. Let them. ...Let them all innovate, let them all compete.' Also in the article 'The domain will not actually be named .mobile, rumours are they are hoping for a coveted one-letter TLD like .m to make it easier to type on a mobile phone.'"

Comments

whocares.m

[thatguywhoiam]

I find the discussion about '.mobile' somewhat boring, just because I have yet to see a really compelling mobile phone/online experience.

I am probably not in the know as I'm in Canada, and I really only have those impressions (along with what I've seen in the US) that I've seen up here... but boy does it suck. Rogers, for instance, tries to charge you by the kilobyte - and then ads useless colour banners with big file sizes to their so-called mobile sites... and then they disable the image-blocking feature on the T68i they sell. Nice huh?

When I can just get some basic info quickly on a mobile phone without hassle - movie times, directions, etc - then I'll be interested. Frankly its a development problem, and a design problem... a new TLD isn't going to help there...

TLD competition for reputation

[G4from128k]

Currenty, TLDs tell you nothing about the reputability of the domain owner -- anyone can get a domain at any TLD. Competition between TLDs could be a good thing in this regard. Some TLDs might become very selective of members -- creating TLDs with high reputations. This is in contrast to some domains, like .biz, that appear to be the lairs for so many spammer ecommerce sites (as far as I have seen).

It would be nice to be able to trust organizations that have a particular TLD -- knowing that the could not get and retain that TLD unless they adhered to a strict ethical code and had the organizational resources to support whatever products/services/info they were providing.