New domain for mobile devices doing well here, registrars say

Despite initial opposition from some powerful tech industry personalities – including World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee – the latest top-level Internet domain is off to a roaring start according to Canadian domain name registrars. "It’s growing, and growing quickly," says Cybele Negris, co-founder and COO of Webnames.ca, a Vancouver domain registrar, of the .mobi top-level domain. Worldwide, companies and individuals resident in more than 100 countries are now .mobi domain holders, thanks to approximately 125 accredited registrars. With mobile devices outnumbering desktop computers four to one worldwide, it’s perhaps expected that a domain catering to mobile Internet users would catch on. Even in Canada, where mobile data penetration has trailed the US, Europe and the Pacific Rim, business has been brisk: while registrations of the .ca domain made up more than half of Webnames.ca’s business last month, the .mobi domain vaulted into second place, accounting for 18% of new registrations. All told, Ireland-based global .mobi registrar mTLD says it processed more than 275,000 .mobi registrations as of the end of November. After initial pre-registration periods from May 22 to 29 and June 12 to September 22 allowed mobile industry associations and trademark holders to cherry-pick the .mobi domains of their choice, the registration process opened up for general bidding. However, any firms waiting out the higher-cost initial "land rush" period in the hopes of registering their desired domain had to do battle with "domainers" – investors who get in early and build a portfolio of domains they believe have potential for resale in the future. One of the latter was Rick Schwartz, who paid US$200,000 for the flowers.mobi domain at a conference in October. Other domains fetching high prices were hotels.mobi (US$19,500), mp3s.mobi (US$13,500) and onlinecasinos.mobi (US$10,500). To feed that domainer market, a list of 5,600 premium generic domain names was set aside by mTLD to be auctioned off rather than apportioned on a first-come first-serve basis. An additional list of 2,700 names – mostly related to emergency services, geographic regions and the like – is being held in reserve and likely won’t be available to the general public in the future. Finally, a request-for-proposals process for four especially valuable names – news.mobi, ringtones.mobi, sports.mobi and weather.mobi – ends on December 18. While demand is clearly there for this latest expansion of the Web, so is the criticism. Detractors such as Berners-Lee have speculated that the.mobi domain would lead to confusion and fragmentation of the Web user community while simultaneously swelling registrars’ fortunes. Other critics note that .mobi doesn’t allow Web developers to do anything that other technologies don’t already allow them to do. Of course, the majority of corporations have yet to exploit the power of the .mobi domain. But Richard Schreier, CEO of Pool.com, an Ottawa-based firm that incorporates an Internet domain registration business with an auction service for recently freed-up domains, notes that with a powerful group of founding backers including Ericsson, Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Nokia, and Samsung Electronics, it would be hard for this latest top-level domain to fail. Already, the most up-to-date mobile phone handsets and BlackBerries can be set to automatically append any partial URLs entered in their browser program with .mobi. "So, if a user keys in ‘banks,’ the device will try to browse to www.banks.mobi," Schreier says. "The one really strong factor is the support from the manufacturers of mobile devices who promise some level of integration with .mobi."

New domain for mobile devices doing well here, registrars say

News | December 14, 2006

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New domain for mobile devices doing well here, registrars say

News | December 14, 2006

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