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Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.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.....
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
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?
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"]
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
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?
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.
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.