.jobs and .mobi on ICANN shortlist

Mobile content may soon have its very own (official) top level domain. The .mobi domain is backed by Microsoft, Nokia, Vodafone, 3, the GSM association, HP, Orange, Samsung and Sun and is earmarked to be run by Afilias (which currently runs the not overly successful .info domain). The move comes as part of ICANN’s push into “sponsored top level domains”, which have a particular target market, such as .museum for museums and .travel for travel companies.

I inserted the word “official” into the previous paragraph because one company is already pushing a top-level domain for mobile phones. dotMP claims the .mp TLD stands for “mobile phone” rather than “Northern Mariana Islands” – which originally received the domain. No-one can blame the small US protectorate for trying to get some money from its domain – after all with a population just over 78,000 they’re not going to need a huge number of domains anyway. Some people find it annoying that TLDs can be used for something other than what they were originally intended for, but without the rampant misuse of the .com TLD we wouldn’t have the World Wide Web as we know it today…

Techdirt’s gone off on a rant, claiming that a seperate domain for mobile devices is unnecessary and merely a tactic to funnel more money into the domain name industry, and eventually to ICANN itself. While there is some merit to that argument, I think having seperate sites formated towards mobiles will be a good thing for the mobile content industry, rather than trying to design browsers to reformat the site on the fly. Of course, it would be just as easy for a company to create a sub-domain rather than register a whole new site.

The big question is how the new domain will be restricted. If the domain is open to anyone for any use it will be essentially valueless, except to domain name resellers. However there is no immediately obvious restrictions that should be placed. The domain will be “marketed for use by Internet services accessible primarily by mobile device users” (‘primarily’ is a worrying word), but will that allow mobile phone operators to use the domain to promote their services on the full-size Web? Will the sites have to conform to a standard size for mobile device screens? Will companies wishing to register a domain have to demonstrate a previous interest in the mobile space? It’s not like it can be as easily restricted as .museum can be.

A lot of thought will have to go into this domain to ensure it is actually of some use, rather than just another domain to be registered by large companies protecting their brand names and ignored by everyone else…

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