The first Internet Governance Forum is on at the moment, prompting a lot of talk about the dominance of English — and particularly US — content on the web, introducing other alphabets into the domain name market and so on. This article does a good job of pointing out that in many parts of the world have a high proportion of mobile users utilizing the web (or internet, depending on how the system is set up), and in some markets mobiles will be the primary means of accessing the internet. “Even via phone, comScore found that the sites of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are among the most accessed in the six surveyed countries. But because of the relationship between cellphone carriers and content providers today, a lot more of the top mobile Internet sites are those set up by phone operators themselves, all of which are country-specific.”
The other benefit here is that mobile phones are already in the local language…now if mTLD made different alphabet domain names available in .mobi that would be useful. The article ends with “if U.S. content hegemony is an issue, then the mobile phone appears to be the leading weapon of the masses against it”.
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