.mobi To Use W3C Guidelines

mTLD LogoWhen mTLD won the rights to administer the .mobi top level domain (TLD) the organization emphasized that companies wishing to use the new TLD would have to abide by a set of guidelines or lose their domain.
It has now been announced that mTLD will adopt the “best practice” guidelines developed by the Mobile Web Initiative, itself a subset of W3C. I’m glad they didn’t decide to set up a different, competing set of guidelines…
Techdirt has raised some concerns about the issue: “Looking at the list of the companies behind .mobi — which includes several of the world’s biggest mobile operators — it’s hard not to be cynical and think that what will drive the practices will really have little to do with making things easier for end users, as they claim, but rather making content fit their agenda.” It’s something to be concerned about, but if the restrictions are unreasonable then content providers will simply use a subdomain of their URL, eg m.disney.com. You can argue against the necessity for a seperate domain for mobile sites (and Techdirt does, quite effectively) but the .mobi domain is going to have an enforceable style guide… it has to because the style guide is the differentiating factor, it’s the whole justification for the existence of the .mobi domain name.
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