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Dot Mobi - a solution to "why phone users don't surf"?

ICANN, fresh from its triumph in "staying American", has come up with a magical solution to the world's mobile operators and their biggest problem - how to increase data traffic. The solution: give phones a .mobi domain.

The plan has been taken amazingly seriously by some. The FT suggested that "The new ".mobi" extension will be used to denote internet pages that have been designed to be viewed on mobile phones," as if the world's mobiles all had the same size screen, or the same mobile browser.

Most commentators seem pretty clear that the magic may not work. Tech News World quoted Gartner vp Phillip Redman: "If you're a service provider, we don't think that a top level domain is an answer to any of the problems that you're having today," and adding: "The answer isn't having another extension; the answer is having more applications and more capabilities for supporting mobile devices."

At The Inquirer, Tony Dennis used the word "crazy" for the idea of a longer-than-normal domain name for a device which was already hard enough to type on, and quoted Tim Berners-Lee who argues that the creation of new top level domains is merely a way of raising revenue for ICANN without any benefit.

Dennis missed one trick, apparently, when he castigated "3" for supporting the move - on the apparently logical ground that "3" doesn't allow its users to browse the real Web. In fact, it's an open secret that "3" will open up its walled garden in the next two or three months.

Hutchison isn't the only mobile operator to be keen on the idea. Other bodies who asked for the new TLD also include the GSM Association, Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Telefonica Moviles, T-Mobile and Vodafone.

Enthusiasm amongst the new club infected The Register a bit: it quoted Rick Fant, also director of mobile services at Microsoft, who said that a new company, mTLD Top Level Domain Ltd "will produce a series of style guides and policies that Fant said he expected to come in the form of a manual and snippets of downloadable sample code."

But reporter Kieren McCarthy also quoted Fant as "keen to stress that .mobi is not and will not become a standards body."

"This is a pick-it-and-go service," explained Fant. "I will fight any attempt to make it a standards body." And, he said, it will be operating system neutral.

Nobody seems anxious to be the one to say: "The problem with the Web on phones is that the screens are too bloody small!" so that's what NewsWireless will contribute to the debate.

The problem with the Web on phones is not only the tiny screens, which really are useless for anything beyond "Australia trashed England in the one-day cricket match" - but also, the capacity of the networks.

If the networks could price data traffic low enough to encourage serious web surfing over GPRS or 3G, they'd be jammed solid with bits, and would have to ration users, or put prices up.

Calling a web site 401.mobi won't make it any more accessible.

Tech News world says "Not a solution

The Inq says "crazy

The Reg says "enthusiasm from mTLD"