mobi Off The Block; Registrations On

location based services


Somehow, any .mobi post we do seems to stirs emotions, and multiple comments. Anyway, .mobi registrations started today, and though none of the major U.S. wireless carriers invested in the company handling the domain, they all registered their dot-mobi domain names today, such as Cingular.mobi, Sprint.mobi and Verizon.mobi. Major media companies such as CBS, Time Warner and News Corp.’s Fox News Channel have also jumped in with new domain names: cbs.mobi, fox.mobi and timewarner.mobi. Even famous movies and TV shows like Batman, Catwoman, Family Guy and The Matrix now have registered dot-mobi sites.To make wireless surfing smoother, Mobile Top Level Domain has required Web developers to follow a set of rules. One rule requires dot-mobi sites not to “cause pop-ups or other windows to appear.” Another requires developers to “divide (dot-mobi web) pages into usable but limited size portions.”A dot-mobi domain name costs $140 a year for trademark names and $45 a year for generic names.Some of the .mobi names, belonging to operators and some content providers (Weather Channel) are already active: Google.mobi, Weather.mobi, Vodafone.mobi, Ericsson.mobi, T-Mobile.mobi, Tim.mobi, and Nokia.mobi, among others.
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One Response to “.mobi Off The Block; Registrations On”
al Says: May 23rd, 2006 at 5:25 pm
I downloaded their list of “premium” names; i.e., names that are not going to be a part of the general registration process and will therefore require a different fee and procedure, and it is amazing to me how many words there are. When I downloaded the .pdf and looked at it, it seriously looked like I was reading through a dictionary.
Why has the .mobi registrar decided to seize so many words? Words like “weirdsex” and “vulva,” or “tallwomen,” “ditto,” and “labradoodle.” Who has decided that “corn” is “premium”? It doesn’t seem that a system that has confiscated nearly every word that’s actually a word, wants to remove them from the general registration, and will then issue them at a higher price, or worse terms, is more fair than the way all other TLDs have been issued: first come, first served.
And why hasn’t this come out yet? This really seems antithetical to the whole notion of fairness in TLD registration