dotMobi starts giving away domains

Cities can apply for a free ".mobi" top level domain, assuming they're prepared to spend €2K a year promoting their site, and the domain name. DotMobi manages the ".mobi" top level domain where content built for mobile phones can be hosted; and the organisation provides various tools for verifying and testing content to ensure …

[David Harper]

.mobi is the next spam TLD

What's the betting that spammers will adopt .mobi domains and render the TLD worthless, in the same way that they did to .biz and .info?

I mean, does anyone reputable use a .biz domain these days? I only ever see them in penis-enlargement spams.

[Jack Moxley]

The Difference

unlike some of the other TLD's .mobi sites are reviewed by dotMOBI and sites may be suspended if they fail to follow the rules prescribed by the company. This is not 100% foolproof but will increase the amount of effort required by spammers using the .mobi domain.

[David Harper]

Re The Difference

The .eu TLD was supposed to be moderated too, but look at the fiasco that the .eu "landrush" turned into.

Perhaps dotMOBI learned a lesson from that debacle and vetted the registrars for .mobi somewhat better than EURid did for .eu, but dotMOBI is claiming that half a million .mobi domains have already been registered. There is no way that they could have reviewed all of those applications.

[Daniel Ballado-Torres]

HTML vs. WML

I think the point of that "new-fangled thing" called WML was for developing websites suitable for mobiles, wasn't it? I mean, small pages, quick, right to the spot, and viewable from a 5" (or less) display. My mobile banking site is an example: I can check my balance in 1 minute, tops. (Well 2 minutes b/c I'm stuck with 9.6kbps CSD)

Why would anyone want to watch a FULL webpage on a screen that small??? I mean, not even taking in mind it would take ages to download, even using EDGE.

So I'd go for .mobi sites, that actually *are* mobile sites (wml/hdml). Not those heavyweight HTML sites...

[James Pearce]

Checking dotMobi compliance

In fact we are capable of crawling all the dotMobi domains and rating them for compliance. In the same way that we provide ad-hoc scoring at http://ready.mobi

Any 'live' sites that obviously aren't providing a good technical experience on a mobile device can be entered into a compliance process, and the site-owner is urged to improve it.

Obviously this doesn't happen as soon as the domain is registered - we're sensible enough to realise that developers should be given a chance to develop something good first.

(Hence our healthy developer community at http://dev.mobi )

James Pearce

CTO, dotMobi