A new ".mobi" suffix was approved for mobile phone websites by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) at a Luxemburg meeting on Monday.

In spite of strong criticism from Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web, ICANN had decided allow the new TLD (Top Level Domain). Requested by a powerful group of companies, including Hutchison 3, GSM Association, Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Telefonica Moviles, T-Mobile and Vodafone, the first small bandwidth websites will be available in 2006.

An initial 90-day "sunrise period" will allow corporations to register their trademarked .mobi domain. Afterwards, domains will be allocated on a first come, first serve basis.

"As .mobi will encourage the usage of advanced functionalities in mobile devices, the market potential for those devices will increase," they said in a joint statement.

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1. Posted by dravonix	Thu Jul 21, 2005 3:25 pm
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/4.0 (MobilePhone PM-8200/US/1.0) NetFront/3.1 MMP/2.0) but will it be embraced by the majority of the mobile community?
2. Posted by marcusg	Fri Aug 12, 2005 2:36 pm
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/4.0 (MobilePhone PM-8200/US/1.0) NetFront/3.1 MMP/2.0) but will it be embraced by the majority of the mobile community? Well considering which companies are behind this top level domain i'd be pretty surprised if it failed miserably.

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