mTLD clarifies .mobi doubts

MTLD, THE body behind the new .mobi domain name has clarified some of the key issues surrounding its whole attempt to promote this new name as the true home for mobile orientated sites.

However, the whole .mobi concept was attacked by Anil Malhotra, vp for marketing and alliances with Bango. He pointed out that there are now more browsers loaded onto mobile phones than there are browsers on PCs. So why was it necessary to pick out the mobile sector as 'different' from the rest of the Net?

Malhotra also argued that most senior Web sites designers were already building their sites to automatically detect if they are being accessed by mobile phones and respond accordingly. "And what are they [mTLD] going to do about handsets connected to services like T-Mobile's Web'n'Walk? Those handsets have HTML browsers anyway," Malhotra claimed.

The whole .mobi environment is due to take off in a few weeks' time (May 22nd2006) with a 'Limited Industry Sunrise'. That's the founders plus a few buddies. That will be followed by 'Trademark Sunrise' from June 12th.

So is it worth trademarking your site to get in early?

The INQ asked UK trademark specialists, Alexander Ramage Associates, how much it might cost a Web site to register its own trademark. One of the partners, Eric Ramage, responded, "It might cost between £250 and £300 for us to conduct a register search and advise on whether a new name infringes prior rights."

"And to get a basic application on file to register a trade mark in the UK costs £350 plus VAT. If there are no problems it costs another £150.00 to get it registered, and will take about 8 months. I don't know if it would serve to get a .mobi domain accepted, though."

So only major corporates will be able to get their hands on a Trademark Sunrise .mobi domain.

The good news is that any site which mTLD feels doesn't meet the requirements will gets three warnings before it gets 'suspended' after 60 days. According to mTLD's Neil Edwards, no-one will actually lose their .mobi domain as a result of non-compliance.

Ronan Cremin, also with mTLD, pointed out that there are only three mandatory rules which .mobi sites need to adhere to and that 'testing' which simply be carried out by machine crawlers.

Edwards added that mTLD hoped to announce shortly the relevant tools for building .mobi sites would become available. He didn't indicate how much they will cost. WAP was held back by a lack of affordable tools, of course.

Edwards also claimed that consumers won't necessarily have to key in the actual characters - .mobi - when visiting a site. That's because browsers from Access, Nokia and Openwave will automatically default to assuming that the user wants the .mobi domain, not the .com site.

There's no indication of how soon such broswers will be loaded onto mobile handsets.µ