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)."

Comments

OK, so...

[wowbagger]

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.

Why make this a TLD?

[Experiment 626]

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?