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In a recent press release, Alan Harper says:

"The aim of the initiative is to accelerate the rollout of Internet products and services specifically designed for mobile devices as well as to ensure far greater operating simplicity for mobile subscribers across the globe. This venture should build on the considerable trust that exists in the mobile community between subscribers and operators."

What is this initiative you ask? A new wireless protocol? A new wireless association? Not exactly! Alan Harper is the group strategy director at Vodafone, one the world's largest mobile telecom operators and he is talking about a recent bid to ICANN for a new unspecified mobile top-level domain. That's right a "mobile TLD" or mTLD. Nine software, telecom, and mobile handset heavyweights (3, GSM Association, HP, Microsoft, Nokia, Orange, Samsung, Sun, and Vodafone) have signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly set up a new Internet names registry company to issue domain names for wireless devices, in an attempt to boost mobile services.

While past TLD trends might tempt us to take this new TLD initiative as just another predictable failure of some yet-unknown degree, it might be time to look at this issue from a whole new perspective in light of what is happening in other Internet-related initiatives. Could this be the tip of the iceberg for a new, more sophisticated TLD era? The Internet storm of the nineties put the domain craze, ecommerce, portals, and everything-dot-com into a tailspin. The nineties were the time of trial-and-error much like any other technology or medium that eventually sneaks its way into the public domain. But while the dust of the nineties is settling, the past hard-earned experiences are now bringing us powerful billion-dollar search engines, the webloging phenomenon, legal music downloading services, RSS, social networks… and, perhaps, next generation TLDs. Future TLDs, yet to be seen, as well as existing ones such as .NET, .Pro, .Travel, mTLDs and the like are 'potentially' explosive as the bulbs are starting to light up in the heads of industry giants. And this time around, the players don't appear to be in an experimental-let-us-see-what-comes-out-of-it mood as we are seeing with the mTLD case:

Christian Salbaing, Managing Director - European Telecommunications, Hutchison Europe Telecommunications SARL said: "3 is delighted to be part of the MTLD alliance to bid for a Mobile Top Level Domain through the ICANN process, and is looking forward to working with other consortium members for the success of this venture. 3 is the first operator to provide commercial 3G services globally and we strongly believe that initiatives such as a dedicated mobile domain name can help to improve our customers experience and promote the creation of new services."

"Creating a unique, standard platform for a mobile Internet environment is a natural next step to enabling new and compelling services for businesses and consumers," said Felice Swapp, director of strategic initiatives and business development, HP. "HP has long been an innovator of mobile technologies for all customer segments, from consumers to enterprises to service providers, and we proudly extend our investment in the future of mobility through our participation in this initiative."

"Orange has always been firmly focused on the customer experience and we are delighted to be part of this important industry-wide initiative that will ensure a compelling content experience on mobile," said Richard Brennan, Executive Vice-President, Orange Global Brand, Marketing and Products. "The creation of this mobile Top Level Domain provides an opportunity for us to deliver clear guidelines that the whole industry will get behind to make it a better environment for our customers as well as content and service partners."

"A mobile mTLD would help Samsung in cooperation with its customers to better serve the end-users with interesting new capabilities," said Mr. John S. Csapo Senior Vice President of Samsung Telecommunications America.

"We believe that a top level domain for mobility is an important step and are excited to be working closely with such a broad coalition to make it a reality," said David Rivas, CTO, Consumer & Mobile Systems Group, Sun Microsystems.

We just might be in for a surprise for the type of uses, policies, fee structures, even technologies and services that might come out of the next generation top-level domains. And yes, even possibly "Very, very, evil”.

By Ali Farshchian, Founder, Editorial & Operations. Visit the blog maintained by Ali Farshchian here.

Related topics: DNS, Domain Names, ICANN, Mobile, Telecom, Top-Level Domains