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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)."

7 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Get rid of the i. by modecx · · Score: 5, Funny

    Really--.mob would be more apt in many ways.

    --
    Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
  2. Strange departure by coflow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.....

  3. Teh Trick! by th0mas.sixbit.org · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  4. .m would be even better by aberson · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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"]

  5. 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.
    --
    www.eFax.com are spammers
  6. 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?

  7. Why is TBL mad? by LionKimbro · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.