As .mobi goes live, Berners-Lee still critical

LincLinc OwnerDetroit Icrontian
edited September 2006 in Science & Tech
Though ICANN approved the name last year, the .mobi names just became available via registrants today. Trademark holders (13,000 of them like Yahoo, Google, etc.) were able to pre-register domains. $25 will buy you the minimum 2 years.

Consumers have been slow to adopt mobile websurfing; it is hoped this TLD (top-level domain) will help remedy that. One mobile analyst, Thomas Husson, was quoted by the BBC offering a different opinion: ""I don't see any structural reasons why dotmobi would be anymore successful than .tv or anything else," he said.

Restrictions, cost confusion, slow connections, and bad design have been blamed for the slow adoption. However, as an example of one popular site doing it right, YouTube has a mobile-specific portal for its content.

So now we have a TLD for a specific type of viewing device. When I first heard about .mobi, the first thing I thought was, "Over Tim Berner-Lee's dead body." The truth is less melodramatic, but not far off the mark. He has publicly stated he believes .mobi to be a bad idea and filed an objection with ICANN.

"Although a supporter of the mobile web, he believes that efforts should focus on making existing content smart enough to be able to recognise what kind of device it is being viewed on, large or small," writes Jonathan Fildes of the BBC. Berners-Lee believes this could be a step toward fragmenting the web.

Berners-Lee also compared creating a new TLD to printing more money, saying original domain names decrease in value while making it more expensive to "protect" a brand.

I think it's a bunch of bull, people need to learn how to use CSS for mobile devices instead, and ICANN should've listened to Tim. How about you?

Source: [url=][/url]

Comments

  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited September 2006
    I agree. Relegating mobile content to its own section of the interwebnet effectively licenses content developers to be lazy or uncreative. TheInquirer, who has not done such a thing, did a particularly wonderful job implementing their website for mobile devices -- I wish other websites would follow suit.

    Oh, four-letter domains are stupid. .info = .nfo, .mobi = .mbl, etc.
  • EnverexEnverex Worcester, UK Icrontian
    edited September 2006
    It was done ages ago for WAP simply because WAP devices couldn't display normal webpages, so the address used was something like wap://www.blah.com but most sites routed it to a subdomain (if they supported WAP) like wap.blah.com so something like this happening for mobile devices doesn't supprise me at all. If they weren't making a domain for it I'm sure most companies would just set up a sub-domain for it instead.
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