Ewan's been mulling over the arrival of .mobi, a domain extension dedicated to mobile access. .mobi has its fans, but it appears that Ewan's not one of them, arguing that it'll cause confusion and fragmentation.
Read on in the full article.
The pros and cons of .mobi
For me this is fascinating stuff, all these new top-level domains, with .mobi only the latest entrant in a long line. Each and every new such TLD flopped, and nevertheless new ones keep coming. Why?
I think they continue to multiply because the players involved know that this is mostly harmless and pretty unimportant entertainment (although they would never admitt this, of course). In the case of .mobi, players like Nokia can make a point about the importance of the "mobile web" and get some attention and free publicity; the .mobi registrar makes some nice money; and after a while, without any risk to get dangerous or controversial, .mobi will follow .name, .coop, .aero and so on into peaceful obscurity.
In contrast, look to things that are really important. They do not just pop up like that, as a form of entertainment for the Internet masses and free-publicity-generators, but are bitterly fought over for many years, until finally a consensus is reached. Things like the DNS with Non-Latin scripts like Arabic, Chinese and Japanese, for example.
If .mobi was important, we would not yet have it, that I am sure about!
While I agree with you that .mobi isn't particularly important, especially seeing as sometime in the (not particularly distant) future, the main computer that will be connecting to the net will be a phone, I don't think that your reasoning for it's unimportance is quite right. The difficulties in adding a tld is more commercial (who gets to make money from the registration process) or politcal (the .xxx tld) than technical (a dns server and a text file editor).
.mobi may be useful for a little while, but I doubt it
Totaly uselesss, in my opinion.
I do agree with a lot what is aid about .mobi. However it should raise awareness about the need to create mobile sites, or one would hope consider how PC sites can be made (via CSS) to be more mobile friendly.
not totally useless, but it will be disregarded. . . sadly.
Rafe,
I guess you won't be taking the .mobi variations of the various domains you own then?
If not only to protect your IP?
Yes I will try and get hold of them, although given what happened with .eu I don't suppose it will be easy. Given this is a mobile site .mobi probably is a good thing.
Rafe wrote:Yes I will try and get hold of them, although given what happened with .eu I don't suppose it will be easy. Given this is a mobile site .mobi probably is a good thing.
For ICANN this is mission accomplished, and is why they keep releasing so many extensions. 😊
I don't think you will have too much trouble.