Mobile top-level domain gets ICANN nod

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 looks crazy.

If mobile sites need their own designation surely a TLD that requires nine key presses on a standard mobile phone isn't the answer? .mpt, for example, only requires three key presses.

What Berners-Lee was arguing, see Father of web wants no more domain names, is that creating a new domain isn't the way to solve the problem of displaying content on small devices.

More to the point, what is going to happen to those sites which have already solved the problem of providing content tailored for mobile phones? For example, my own site - www.wapinsight.com - runs a script that detects a mobile phone's browser and redirects the caller to either a WAP 1.2 or 2.0 site.

What's going to happen? Do we need to all need to rebrand to .mobi? And how are such sites going to rebuild the publicity they already have?

Those backing the call for .mobi included T-Mobile, Telefonica, Vodafone and 3. Which is once again quite surreal. Why should anyone with a 3 handset currently care what domain name an independent site has? They can't break out of 3's closed garden at present, anyway.

The body charged with handing out the new domain is mTLD Top Level Domain. It won't apparently let the new domain loose until Q1-Q2 2006. Initially those who want to protect their brand names will get the first bite of the cherry.

Which will mean the .mobi domain stands a good chance of becoming an even worse farce than WAP was. Mobile handset owners will find the first .mobi sites are things like www.famoustrainers.mobi, which - given that there's no obvious payback for investing heavily in a mobile specific site - will point to a few pages, if that.

So the INQ would tend to agree with Berners-Lee. What's needed is an industry standard method of detecting mobile browsers. And creating a new domain name won't help that. µ