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mTLD's .mobi entered the root zone on Tuesday, quietly contrasted amidst all of the recent ICANN/VeriSign announcements.
The .mobi mTLD is a Dublin, Ireland based joint venture between the Nokia Corporation, Vodafone Group Services Limited, and Microsoft.
The .mobi domain was granted to service a sponsored community, consisting of,
Afilias, operators of the .INFO and .ORG gTLDs, will be operating the registration services, and UltraDNS has been tapped to provide resolution services for .mobi.
Congratulations should be made to all of the folks in the .mobi consortium and the new management team at MTLD who are putting the foundations in for a very interesting sponsored Top-Level Domain (sTLD).
I certainly saw a great and concerted effort on behalf of respected industry colleagues, Don Mason and Rick Fant, in consulting mTLD with the ICANN sTLD approval process. I understand that Don Mason is now consulting with other TLDs, but must absolutely applaud his successes and patience in the .mobi process.
The mTLD Initiative was founded in March, 2004 and submitted an application to ICANN for the creation of .mobi. In the culmination of a year long process, a group of mobile & Internet investor companies formed a joint venture named mTLD Top Level Domain, Ltd. to perform the registry functions of the newly approved, .mobi domain, including: Ericsson, GSM Association, Hutchison, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung Electronics, Syniverse Technologies, Telefonica Moviles, TIM, T-Mobile and Vodafone.
As .mobi was created to serve its sponsored community, mTLD has an open, organizational structure for input from its sponsored community through the Membership Advisory Group (MAG) and Policy Advisory Board (PAB), whose purpose is to act as a gathering place for the sponsored community and its associated organizations to discuss policy issues and recommendations with respect to the ".mobi" domain.
mTLD Top Level Domain, Ltd. is an Irish-based company.
By Jothan Frakes, Chief Operations Officer at Minds + Machines. Visit the blog maintained by Jothan Frakes here.
Related topics: DNS, ICANN, Mobile, Telecom, Top-Level Domains
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.MOBI is a most interesting experiment. Once the big players get established, they plan to throw it open to individual registrants. There's a whole bunch of rules about what's supposed to go in .MOBI, mostly requiring that it work from mobile phones. In Luxembourg, someone from .MOBI came and talked to the ALAC, and I asked what would happen if someone started putting random non-mobile junk in a .MOBI domain.
They have a process, but it's so slow and cumbersome that it could handle, oh, three problem domains a year.
So a year from now, when you see .MOBI overrun with the same high quality registrants you see in .BIZ and .INFO, you heard it here first.
Oh what fun. And isn't .mobi meant for only mobile infrastructure? No reason to see email related traffic through it at all I'd guess?
MOBI from English "mob" and initial of the Occidental root "individu"; or latin plural "i". Any member of the disorderly crowd of Internet users. A specialised TLD for individual activist domain name (IADN, not to confuse with the other worldwide ICANN success, IDNA). Lead to the neologism: "mobiist".
NB. The mob of individual domain name owners was named IDNO in the past and was initiated by Joop Teernstra.
Not affiliated to mobil oil.
Hidden address registration site "http://mtld.mobi".
(look-up error until further notice).
Demonstrates that ICANN does not master the DNS yet: as a proof of disconcept one can try mobi://icann.org. This lead a while some to understand "mTLD" as a new ICANN type of TLDs (moot TLDs). But "mtld" is a nice mnemonic for "My TLD"....
Direct competition to ".gprs"
Mobi, welcome to the TLD mob!
Responding to Suresh, .mobi is not meant exclusively for mobile phones - it's a reasonable method to help ensure that web and other Internet content will work in a consistent manner on mobile devices.