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Mobile Top Level Domain Gets ICANN Nod

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the jungle-gets-thicker-every-day dept.

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)."

5 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Mobi huh? by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 2, Interesting

    These galls should apply for www.mobi

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    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
  2. It doesn't matter... by kryptx · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It doesn't really matter what the TLD is. Internet-enabled phones will provide a way to enter it expediently.

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  3. OK, so... by wowbagger · · Score: 4, Interesting
    OK, so, rather than either
    1. Making your site gracefully scale down for mobile devices based upon CSS, or
    2. Making your site detect the mobile's User Agent and redirecting them to a section of your site designed for mobile use, or
    3. Having a "lite" section of your site and letting the user select it.

    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.
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    www.eFax.com are spammers
  4. Why make this a TLD? by Experiment+626 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  5. Ramblings by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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