The 11-member group, which draws on the wireless industry, has submitted an application to ICANN, the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers, to offer a mobile TLD. Multiple strings, including .mobile, have been suggested.
The idea behind the move is to create a domain that would be used by services targeted at mobile devices. Cellular carriers would add location data to .mobile lookups, so the service provider could provide a custom service on the fly.
Somebody using the mobile device to access taxis.mobile, for example, could get a web page that showed listings of local cab firms, based on which cell they were in. The same thing could happen for restaurants, theaters, cinemas, and so on.
Microsoft director of standards and technology Mike Wehrs said that if ICANN approves the .mobile application, anybody will be able to register a name there, but that there will be a relatively small number, in the hundreds, of valuable names reserved.
Ownership of these generic domains, such as restaurants.mobile, would be opened to a competitive bidding process, Wehrs said. There would be rules about availability, such as the service must be available globally, he said.
A second part of the vision is to serve people who, in future, will want to run internet services from their handhelds. Wehrs gave the example of people running web servers on their phones, hosting photographs that they have just taken for others to access.
Since these people would be hopping between IP addresses as they went about their business, a domain name linked to their phone, and a DNS infrastructure fast enough to keep up, would be the best way to provide reliable addressing.
Also involved in this bid are Nokia, Vodafone, 3, the GSM Association, HP, Orange, Samsung, Sun Microsystems, T-Mobile and Telecom Italia Mobile. If ICANN approves the bid, they will form a joint venture that will be the TLD’s sponsoring organization.
But it’s not a slam-dunk for this coalition by any stretch. There is believed to be at least one other group applying to run a very similar type of domain, and others that are also considering telecoms-related domains.
We think that if it came down to us or them for a mobile TLD, we’d win, said Wehrs, pointing to the wide international wireless industry support for the application.
An addition hurdle could be that ICANN is asking for sponsored TLD applications, and it’s not clear that the Microsoft-led coalition is proposing, strictly speaking, a sponsored TLD (sTLD), which by definition are not open to registrations by anyone.
ICANN’s previously approved sTLDs are .coop, museum and .aero, which are open to registrations only to entities that can be verified as falling within certain classes of organization – museums, co-ops, and aerospace organizations.
A possible .mobile seems more likely to be classed as a generic or global TLD, lie .com or .info, which could have a chance of being approved by ICANN at a later date, when it opens the doors for more gTLD applications.
Wehrs said that the coalition has done a lot of research into what ICANN is looking for and is confident that the .mobile application is meets the definition of a sponsored TLD precisely.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
