Slashdot Mirror
Mobile Top Level Domain Gets ICANN Nod
Sushant Bhatia writes "Despite fierce criticism from Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web, ICANN has decided to go ahead and create a new TLD (Top Level Domain) aimed at mobile phones and other mobile devices. Bizarrely the new domain will be '.mobi'. Considering that one of the chief banes of accessing the Internet from a mobile phone is the fact that keying in long Internet addresses takes time, the decision to use .mobi seem odd. A good place to keep up with the ongoings of ICANN is the ICANN Watch which reports that a TLD system has been launched in Turkey as the result of an alliance between the Turkish Informatics Association (TBD) and Unified Identity Technology (UNIDT)."
Really--.mob would be more apt in many ways.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Why is this TLD based on the medium used to access it? In the past the TLD had more to do with the nature of the organization hosting the website.....
dot-mobi? Huh? What's that?
.museum TLD to .muse? .mobile could actually turn out to be useful..
How come they didn't restrict the
It's just as many letters,
(..oh, and 3.Profit!, imagine a beowulf cluster, does it run linux and in soviet russia, and so on.)
Proof that ICANN is staffed by idiots.
... for a flood of ".Mobi Dick" jokes.
Why not .mob?
1. Read other news sites (fark especially), and remember the best comments for each story. ...?
2. Wait until the same story comes up on slashdot (2-3 days)
3.
4. Profit!
twitter.com/gravitronic
Hardly breaking news. This was in todays Guardian
These galls should apply for www.mobi
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
They considered shortening it to ".mob" but the Mafia threatened a class action for TLD squatting.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
...no one at ICANN has kids.
-Valiss
It doesn't really matter what the TLD is. Internet-enabled phones will provide a way to enter it expediently.
Mods: Do you disagree with me? Go ahead and mod me down. Meta-mods will sort it out. Good luck!
I soo disillusioned now.
It may currently be a problem to type on a cellphone, but the trend with mobile devices seem to point in the direction of the blackberry, sidekick, or palm treo. Using any of these devices, typing isn't nearly as much of a problem.
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
Considering that one of the chief banes of accessing the Internet from a mobile phone is the fact that keying in long Internet addresses takes time, the decision to use .mobi seem odd.
.mobi instead of making you key it in.
This is a domain targeted specifically at phones. So it is reasonable to assume that phone manufacturers will create something that automatically fills in the
Of course, who knows how many of these addresses will really be optimized for phones. It probably won't take long for domain speculators and porn shops to gobble them up.
unless there's a reason that you can't have a 1 character tld
[not to mention that "mo" are on the same key in a cellphone, making it even more annoying to key in... but at least predictive text might pick up that you're typing "mobile"]
Assuming I could register a .mobi address for my phone, now what? Was something like [my phone number]@[wireless provider].[net or com] too difficult? It seems like a solution looking for a problem.
I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person that I'm preaching to.
That mobile browsers will automatically check for a .mobi for the site your trying to reach before requesting the real site and butchering the hell out of it. and it is only one fucking character
All of which entail nothing more than some extra sections on your existing web server, ICANN would have you have to register a second domain, and either run virtual web services on your server or run multiple servers.
Yes, that makes sense.
www.eFax.com are spammers
"Berners-Lee slammed the newly proposed .xxx domain name for adult content which he said would not create an adult-content repository. He said the definition of what adult content was too wide for the domain name to be effective."
.com is way too wide.
The definition of adult content is too wide? What about the definition of a commercial site? Too me, it seems
So ICAAN creates a new TLD, and 1 of 2 things happen:
1) existing address holders sign up for the same names under the new TLD, which just suck cash into domain registrars for no real benefit.
2) Existing adress holders dont' sign up, which allows other people to grab the address and use it with the new TLD...NOT. I can't, grab "IBM.mobi" because of trademark issues, etc.
Who benefits from new TLD's? The namespace isn't increasing.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
1. Make new TLDs .profit
2. ???
3.
stick with just a few one .biz sounded good, but .xxx was just surreal
imagine all the warez/p0rn "underground" sites lining up
yeah right!
[JL] IH8U
They should have went with .stupid instead.
Why should this be a top level domain? It seems like "mobi.slashdot.org" would work just as well as "www.slashdot.mobi", with the added advantages to Website operators of not having to maintain a separate domain, and to users of knowing for sure that the former is actually affiliated with the "slashdot.org" domain (less fake sites, phishing, etc.). So what are the advantages of the TLD approach that caused this to get approved?
Is there any real reason they couldn't have done .M or .MOB or .MBL Or anything that didn't have Fscking 4 characters?!
There is evidence to prove both Democrats and Republicans are lying cocksuckers. Vote independently.
How long until .coke and .pepsi are top level domains?
I guess now if you want to protect your trademark, you have to buy dozens of TLDs today and perhaps hundreds tomorrow if ICANN continues its goofy trend.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Nice. Yet another TLD without a purpose. Everybody wants the .com anyway; the rest just adds confusion. Was it .com, .net, .org, .fr, or .mobi? And yes, this does lead to real problems with real people.
Also, what I find much more important than the TLD, when are mobiles going to be truely usable as web clients? With PDAs, the usability is pretty good, and properly built websites run on them without a problem. But with mobile phones, access is problematic. Most don't support XHTML, which means pages must be made in the WML format, which is just a complete abomination. It does away with all the meaningful structure of HTML, allegedly to make things simpler, and then adds a whole lot of complexity with its scripting language. And then most phone's HTTP implementations is horribly flaky - fragmenting the headers will cause many phones to not render the page.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
My cell phone is an older verizon phone (don't know exactly, bought it cheap early last year) and it has a button where you can click it once, then choose 1 to add .com, 2 to add .edu, 3 to add .org. It wouldn't be too hard to add a 4 .mobi 5 .biz 6. info, and you wouldn't have to worry about it?
Tonights forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning
I wonder if my ex-wife will register for ala.mobi
Ouch... sorry
-FL
and run an webserver in your pocket? whenever it 404's your pants can ring.
Google just won a judgement on variations of Google spelling in domain names. After a few thousand new domains get registered, watch for Moby to go after everyone.
He told the conference that when you print money, you devalue the money you already printed, and that was what was happening with increasing the number of domain names.
Well this all because of stupidity and the commercialization of the Internet. TLDs had a purpose but that purpose now has been shifted into one thing. Create anther so people will register their name again.
Stupid courts/and others are to blame for letting companies/groups think they have to have their name in each TLD even though that TLD has nothing to do with them.
Why not .m?
Tims Berners-Lee complains about this... Tims Berners-Lee complains about that... For the father of the web, this guy does an awful lot of complaining about it.
Sometimes, the father needs to take his child down. I think he needs to take more extreme actions. Like domain terrorism, or something.
Why create a top domain specifically for mobile phones? I thought the top domain reflected the type of content a site has, or the type of organisation behind the content, not the device meant to access the content. To me it seems sort of like having a .ftp domain. Or are .mobi pages only meant to contain ring tones and such? Otherwise, what is the reason for it?
Change your name to Roland Piquepaille.
Again dumb politics at ICANN triumph over common sense and usability. This is going to turn into another domain for pr0n and spammers to buy up.
Voice your opinion!
WAP is very quick to type on a cellphone... i always assumed the acronym was chosen for that purpose.
When I want to access the WAP-version of a hompage (since that is what my phone supports), I try wap.domain.whatever, or domain.whatever/wap. These two almost never fails. I just don't understand why you want an additional domain for it. Tim Berners Lee has a point. "When you print money, you devalue the money you already printed" is a very good comparison, actually.
The .Mobi follows the loudest idiot .mobi rules
The
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Not only did they put a 4 letter TLD - on a device where it's important to have short URLs but on most ABC phones, it would require 6- pause - 666 - 22-444 8 key presses and a pause!!!!! My suggestion, in just 3 seconds of thinking I came up with 6-7-9 MPW which would give you mobile phone web.
Why would someone do this? why? it doesn't make sense!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Quick go register:
Herman.Melville.mobi
or
dick.mobi
Crunch!
Other way around: .mobi sites are supposed to be accessed from your phone. What you're suggesting sounds more like a way to get at your phone.
That's actually a more useful idea, and I believe that there are a couple of proposals for such a thing (except that they'd probably omit the wireless provider and just give your phone a unique URL with a specialized TLD, and no registrar.)
This idea is supposed to be that if you wanted to get google.com specialized for your mobile device, you'd go to google.mobi instead. Not a completely useless idea; just a mostly useless idea.
There is already a mobile-TLD... was there something wrong with .MP? http://www.nic.mp/cs/about_tld.html
If internet addresses are numbers and phones are excellent at dialing numbers, why not just use the IP address as a decimal number?
Dialing 429-496-7295 (4,294,967,295) certainly wouldn't be difficult. That number translates to the IP address 255.255.255.255.
I dial numbers like that all the time. Just assign it a prefix (like *9 or #9 or something).
moby.mobi... Why do I want to reach for my revolver?
.moto or .beepbeep or .cargobeepbeep would get actually looked at for mobile IP devices mounted in cars...
We could spend all day inventing stupid domains and take bets on which ones get taken seriously. Good money that
Insert rolling eyes emoticon here, set to infinite loop...
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
He says it will devalue existing domain names.
Okay, so: What's wrong with that?
These are mnemonics, not currencies.
Their intent was never to be a currency. Just mnemonics.
If you are buying up names because you think they'll be valuable later on, you're doing something dumb. The names system doesn't owe you anything. You aren't owed a profit on names.
Let the names be plentiful.
Get it, CANN'ed.. ;)
Who cares about Tim Berners-Lee? TLDs existed for decades before anyone every heard of of him.
Maybe we should also consider Al Gore's input?
See title :-)
--
Toby
...just how many cell phone are going to be running web servers anyway?!?!
(sorry)
The device detection problem is a big one. Tim is right on this. URLs are how we identify sites that we want to go to, not how we identify content. There should be one URL for all content types and the site should do the right thing for the device.
That's a complicated problem. There are about 1,000 different mobile devices currently in use. Keeping track of them, and the different types of content they need, is tough.
Most devices can handle one of four different types of content:
- Full HTML: desktop computers, etc
- Mobile XHTML: newer phones
- WML: older or mid-range phones
- cHTML: DoCoMo i-mode phones in Japan
Within these four basic types, there are still more questions:- Screen size: How big should images be
- Image types: PNG, GIF, JPEG, or WBMP?
- Media types: can it play videos, etc?
- Java types: MIDP1, MIDP2, DoJa, or perhaps even J2SE?
There's no way to make this work without some specialized software help. One tool is the free open-source WURFL. Another tool is, of course, our own DeviceSource and Mobile Web Module.Creating another domain shifts more work to users (in the form of marketing the other URL, remembering it, using it). Users shouldn't have to do work. Tools should do work.
Anyway, if Slashdot ever wants to get a license to our software to have a mobile Slashdot you can read on the phone, contact us: info@chiralsoftware.net.
It's a location, like the country-based TLDs used by the non-US world.
Whether it makes sense to have a mobile-location domain or not is debatable. It certainly isn't necessary, though it may be desirable. Or maybe there's some pressing need I just don't see.
The question is, who is going to acquire the second-tier domains? Will it be mobile carriers, so that you get a hostname when you sign up for your phone/PDA service? That seems most likely.
But why can't they use their existing domain? Maybe while you're traveling in Europe or East Asia, changing countries a lot, and you need a way to address your phone independent of where you are ... no, it still doesn't make sense. Your net connection either comes through someplace you connect to while traveling or it comes through your base back home. In neither case do you need a .mobi address.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
I still cannot understand why nobody has put a stop to the wave after wave of new, meaningless top level domains that keep getting pumped out. You can't go register www.amazon.info or www.amazon.biz and open a store there, Amazon.com would sue you for trademark infringement (and probably rightfully so).
.mobi (a ridiculously asinine name, by the way) becomes available for purchase, Amazon is going to register amazon.mobi, and every other trademark-concious brand will do the same. It's not like you're going to be able to register yahoo.mobi or redhat.mobi, or maybe you'll be able to register them, but you'll promptly be hearing from the trademark holders' lawyers.
.aero? Why does aerospace get its own tld but not the Auto industry, which would seem to be much larger? .museum? a 6 character TLD? So what is the Met, met.museum? That's asinine. .kids makes sense as a white-listed kid-friendly tld, parents could then restrict their comptuers to the .kids TLD maybe. No commercial sites allowed in .kids! Most of the new TLDs just add exponential layers of confusion. Was it on Amazon.biz or Buy.net or Google.info or AOL.name or Disney.kids or ... etc. Just endless layers of stupidity.
.1 or something like that, something ridiculously easy to enter on a phone.
As I see it, these new TLDs are only being created to get trademark-concious companies to cough up more money for yet another domain name while having basically no value for either the company or the customer. As soon as
None of the TLDs make any sense.
On top of everything else, having a 4-character TLD for cell phones shows just how out of touch ICANN is and why they should not be given any control of the internet, and should have any existing control revoked. ICANN is inept and worthless. The cell phone TLD should be
rooooar
MOD PARENT UP!
.com and if that fails they call their tech savvy kids and ask why the Internet is broken.
Joe public doesn't remember the TLD anyway. They try
TLDs are a bad idea.
Why would having slashdot.com and slashdot.org going to different sites EVER be a good thing?!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
all other TLD's from the last few years could be merged under it
I know nothing about how ICANN makes these decisions, so this is wild speculation on my part. If I'm on target, those in the know can mod this up or supply their own insightful comment.
With every new TLD, big corporations with brand names to protect essentially must register their name in the new domain. Chevron, GM, IBM, Verizon, etc., etc. There are a LOT of companies out there with a vested interest in keeping their brand/trademark undiluted. Sure, they can seek arbitration to get domain names back from people squatting, but is it cheaper to just register the name?
Who makes $$$ from all these "frivolous" registrations? Anyone directly involved with ICANN? If so, then ICANN can't be trusted to make these decisions anymore, the representatives have a profit motive to create more TLDs.
- Jasen.
As a victim of TLD system in Turkey, I can honestly say that adding new TLD without any apparent need is just making things harder for everyone. Turkey is really bad example of this structure. Not only web sites become unstandard and harder to find, but also you can't even get .com.tr and .org.tr domain unless you submit some hard to get legal documents.
.org.tr. Or you can't put any kind of commercial service owned by your company on any .com.tr domain name.
.gen.tr. Guess what it stands for. 'generic'. If you'll get an internet address w/o a company name, or you don't have legal rights to form a foundation you have to buy this one.
.pol.tr, for 'Police', and '.av.tr' for 'Lawyers'. And '.bel.tr' for municipies. And I really wonder how many regitrants those domains have. Not to mention they choosed names half English half Turkish which is unsuprisingly dumpest selection of abbreviations.
I mean come on, here's internet. In here what you're is what you want to be. Unless you don't do any illegal activity you can pretend to be whatever you are. But in system as in Turkey you can't even prepare a friend community with
Ironically though, Turkey instead has some clever TLDs worse than what ICANN is pushing. Like
Let's move further other TLDs in Turkey. '.name.tr', which you should get with your name. Bleh. This is cheapest offered domain and unless there's a conflict over it you can get any name, so that's my alltime purchase. There's also stupidist '.tel.tr' which is for your Telephone number!?
It's even worse, there're dozens of TLDs like
As I said you can't get basic '.com.tr', or '.net.tr' but there're lots of stupid domain names in Turkey. As victim of this stupid TLD system I mostly get international domains. And Turkey is just making worst service on domain name issues. So system in Turkey should be the last example to world community.
Maybe the porn industry should follow suit, and create their own TLD so kids would be less likely to stumble into their sites. That way, parents could just block everything from that TLD, and save the hassle.
.cum for porn sites.
I vote that we create the new TLD of
Hey, people are complaining, but .mobi beats what they were considering before:
.mobiledevicetopleveldomain
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
seriously though, all these TLDs are just making the net more confusing. it used to be you had to remember the part between "www." and ".com". if it was an edu or org, it was still kinda obvious. now you have to remember the proper TLD also, unless every one of your favorite sites buys up all of the TLDs.
The appropriate means of accomodating mobile devices is the use of CSS @media handheld directive. Mobile users shouldn't have to go to a separate site.
Why this is bad has been covered before...
.toaster tld? what about .fridge or .car?
Tim Berners-Lee talked about it over a year ago, and many other people have covered the reasons why it's bad.
The main reason being that creating top level domain names for specific devices is dumb. Cell phones / mobile devices may be hot shit right now, but what happens in 10 years when every device we own had access to the web... will we get a
User agents have content negotiation and identify themselves for a reason. that is what should be used, not the TLD to determine content.
When will it end for us to keep adding stupid top-level domains without any form of objective thinking (i.e.: do people REALLY think that .xxx will block pornography for kids and that all pornography will move to the .xxx domain?). I think there's a lot of politics and money involved in all this and little common sense.
/.
.com and all as one long string). This means that google could now register the domain name "google", while its existing google.com would now become "google.com".
I think a more productive thing might be for we to get rid of top-level domain names altogether and to allow spaces in names, so that we could go to websites by typing things like:
google
yahoo
coca cola
burger king
the movies
And a nice side bonus of doing this is that all current top-level-domain-based names would be compatible with the new system (we simply interpret them literaly, with
This also means that almost all networking code will work unchanged (and in cases where people do check for top-level domains to be part of the name, all they have to do now is simply delete the code that makes that check).
Then, if you want a mobile portal into your website you could tell people to go to:
mobile yahoo
or
m yahoo
or
yahoo m
or
m.yahoo
or
mobile.yahoo
or whatever you want. Now, isn't this simpler? Not to mention that it allows for way more domain names than today, and it makes it easier for search engines to index your site based on its name.
The only rule would be that spaces cannot appear consecutively after other spaces, i.e.: "foo foo" is ok, but "foo foo" is not (the browser could take care of leaving only one space if the users types in more than one consecutively), this is to avoid people who exploit people's typing mistakes.
As for preventing other people to use the equivalent o a second-level domain name within your domain (i.e.: someone registering the domain name "google search") we could simply reserve the use the dot for such a purpose *after* the name, as in "yahoo.movies" or "google . earth" or "ibm.research.lab1.machine1" which even though it looks weird it makes MUCH more sense once you think about it (remember that in roman-derived languages we write from left to right).
ICANN is largely irrelevant. This is the only way for them to get some press.
How long till there's a www.moby.mobi?
Because our 13 root servers would then need to store every domain name in existance (NS and A records). It entirely defeats the purpose of a hierarchical database, which the Domain Name System is.
Gadsden.info is a good site I have bookmarked. I don't know if the owner uses an email at that domain, though.
Constitutionally Correct
That doesn't matter. The hierarchical system has already been defeated long ago. Look at the size of .com .com are running, so similar servers for the root level should be no problem.
Servers for
I had the same though earlier, but came to the conclusion that it would be hard to implement. For one thing, the root DNS server would have to work even harder.
.co.uk stuff. It would require reworking the heirachial structure of DNS a bit.
Now they have to know everything, not just where to send
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
Yes, the hierarchical DNS should be buried.
It was broken from the day it was defined with the highest level at the right (the UK has used a more logical left-to-right system for some time but in the end it was converted to the right-to-left system crafted by the Americans).
But the general public does not understand it. Now that the Internet is for the general public, the domain names should be restructured to what the general public expects. i.e.:
- a flat system, upon which structure can be added as the user of the name (rather than the designer of the system) deems appropriate
- allow a wider character set, including characters that are now "forbidden" for unclear reasons (like underscore, space)
- allow international characters
It's not a location, unless you foresee a great number of mobile webservers. I live in the Netherlands, but I don't just surf the .nl web. Just because I'm using a mobile device doesn't mean I should be restricted to .mobi. My laptop can render HTML just fine. So far, TLDs reflected the type of business, second-level-domains the name of the business, and third-level-domains the service offered by the business (e.g., mail., www., etc)
Now, all of a sudden, the device you use determines the which domain you must go to. So there's an http://www.icann.com/, but rather than having mobile.icann.com (which is appropriate in the old scheme) you now have either www.icann.mobi or just icann.mobi.
What does this do for businesses? Well, they'll have to register another domain, otherwise there will be squatting and problems when you finally DO want mobile services. And with a whole lot of businesses that's a whole lot of extra annual cash.
With .tv, and .web already out there, what's next? Why not .pda? Or .cam? When clothes become 'Net enabled, maybe we'll see .gap.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I'll bet over 80% of lookups are for .com, and most of the rest for .org. I won't even bother to look up a reference unless you think I'm wrong. The point is, the few TLD's in use are worthless precisely because their branching factor in the heirarchy is so low. They are worthless technically (for load balancing), and worthless semantically (because there's no relation between all the domains under .com).
As a sibling mentioned, doing away entirely with TLDs is not such a good idea.
.tel TLD
I talked in detail about this in a previous slashdot discussion about the similarly abominable
This is just another twist at the Telecommunication companies' way to squeeze just a little more money out of people.
.MOBI DOMAINS!
Look, all phones would soon read normal html like any other web-browser (e.g. look at Opera's reader for mobile phones).
There's absolutely NO REASON why this mobile-domain should be created.
TELECOM! WE WON'T BUY ANY MOBILES THAT ARE LIMITED TO
That may have been a joke about Morse code, but seriously - I handle Morse code faster than I can key anything on a cell phone. I got my Advanced class amateur radio license back before they "streamlined" the certifications, so I had to pass a Morse code test at 20 WPM. Probably faster than some of my friends type.
Currently TLD's are already fairly useless for that purpose. Try "whois mcdonalds.org". The fight over "sex" would be no worse than the fight over "sex.com" that already happened.
I do agree with your previous assertion that country codes are useful, but again, I'm not suggesting they go away, or that the existing TLDs be forcibly opened up (i.e. .fr would still point to something in France, as it does now).
Now if only they can get Moby to do a concert to promote it.
dick.mobi?
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
.gov
I think maybe my post was too circumspect. All I was saying was that the rationale for having .mobi as a top-level domain was that it was analogous to other TLDs like ".nl" or ".us".
.mobi users would have to "stay in .mobi" makes no sense. Using the DNS address as a criterion for presentation doesn't work, either - will there be no servers in .mobi? If there won't be, that's even worse.
Saying that
I agree that it's a solution to a problem I don't think exists, or at least it's swatting a fly with dynamite.
Your cynical analysis that it's all about selling more addresses is probably right.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
For future growth, the hierarchical model makes sense. As asia and europe grow in the internet market, ccTLDs (like .cn, or the IDN equivalents) will grow.
Granted, semantically, the gTLDs have no use, but the ccTLDs do. Most of the motivation for the specialized TLDs (like .pro, .xxx, .tel, .mobi, etc.) are to make money, as the registy operators and the registries know that the large corporate clients will purchase domains.
I wonder how much dick.mobi would sell for? I may register it just to post an illegal copy of the book online for reading with your cell phone.
Or I'll just sell it off as a gay pr0n site. Hmmm.
I'LL BE RICH I TELL YOU!
If it's used enough, a mobile phone could have a ".mobi" button.
It is dumb. Oh yes. The only remotely sensible directory structure is one that gets more specialised "up" the tree and more generalised toward the root, with a smattering of roots.
All these new TLDs are extending a domain namespace in both directions. Forget the hassle of having to register so many domains, it isn't relevent - it is just the way it is priced.
Either do it one way or the other. If you are going to have a presence on the internet for mobile user with its own name under your namespace, then fine.
But either our namespace extends in one direction or the other.
Right now, I have zencore.co.uk, zencore.com and zencore.biz, all pointing to the same place. And I have mail. and ftp. and whatever. dot prefixed to them all.
In the context of the way I purchased those domains and the way that domain names work these days, it makes sense for me to have them. In a context that approaches anything like sensibleness, it doesn't begin to make sense.
The "top" level should be the namespace: 'zencore'. Any specialisation should happen lower down. Whether that be mobi.zencore or zencore.mobi doesn't matter, as long as it is consistent.
Now I can see some sense in being able to distibute load on the top level servers, but surely the vast percentage of sites are
And the idea of people sharing namespace through ".net" or ".com" or ".org" has proven not to work anyway, phishing being a small example.
To understand this latest nonsense, it is as usual, a case of following the money combined with short-sighted stupidity.
This is the process that drives most of the activity of humans as far as I can see.
koan
This signature intentionally left blank
You can always use Shortify to access websites from a mobile phone. It's like TinyURL, but the part after the slash is entirely numeric.
More importantly, you can access Shortify by typing the address out using the numbers on your phone.
From a PC:
http://shortify.com/
From a Phone:
http://74678439.com/
(SHORTIFY on the number pad)
Examples:
http://74678439.com/1187
(Yahoo! Mobile)
http://74678439.com/1188
(Slashdot Mobile)
It's not an ideal solution, but it's considerably easier than typing out the full URL using multitap.
ICANN is suffering from learning disability. Their last offers - .name, .biz, .info, .pro, etc. - were... uh... let's say "not exactly very successful".
Now they do more of the same, as if it would make a difference, which it won't. But it's a typical sign of an institution going downhill if it can't adapt anymore and doesn't learn from past mistakes.
My bet: Five years from now, ICANN will be either gone, or so unimportant that it could just as well go away because nobody would notice anyways.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
WAP is the proper TLD name for typing on mobile phone keypad. You need to predd only 3 keys once.
Now to type in "mobi" you need to press 9 keys !
I'm actually at the ICANN conference in Luxembourg right now and I was in an At-Large Advisory Committee meeting when the people who are going to be running .mobi ( http://www.mtldinfo.com/> )announced that it had just been signed in the night before. (And I posted this news to slashdot two days ago, but it wasn't deemed worthy at the time.)
.mobi, .xxx, .museum, etc. Many of them have failed (.museum, .aero) and many have potential (.jobs, .xxx). However these are all aimed at the english-speaking portion of the web, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me because as far as most Americans are concerned, the only TLD's that exist are .com, .org, .net, and .edu. Anything else is just annoying. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, the TLD for their country is the most desirable. For the UK, it's .uk, for here in Lux, it's .lu.
.jobs for example will only sell domains to organizations that employ people. .xxx will only sell to the adult industry. These people pay a premium (in the case of .xxx, $10 US per domain) that goes back into the system to make sure that the TLD is going out to the right people, and in the case of .xxx, to make sure domains that are sold are not being used for child pornography.
.mobi people seem to have lots of corporate support to their cause, including cell phone manufacturers and service providers, but they have no strict rules that all .mobi sites must be compliant with cell phones. It would be very easy to get a domain and fill it with flash or other code that would simply not work on mobile phones and no one would care.
.mobi will end up another failed TLD like .biz and .pro
Anyway, there is a lot of talk about the usefulness of these new sponsored TLD's such as
For those of you that don't know a sponsored TLD is one that is controlled and not just anyone can buy them.
The
It seems to me that