And now theNet.mobi

Today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (shortened as ICANN, so as to sound optimistic) has unveiled a plan to carve out a separate area of the Internet for people who browse through mobile phones. The new TLD (top-level domain) will be .mobi (dot mobi). So in the future if you wanna surf the Net from your mobile you would have to go to "ThatGreatSite".mobi

When ICANN, under tremendous pressure from various quarters, announced that it would move all pornographic content on the web to a .xxx TLD, I thought they were talking nonsense because it would be impossible to draw a line as to what is adult content and what isn't. This latest move raises more doubts.

The Inquirer features an article which quotes Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, suggesting that he is fed up with ICANN's obsession to carve out slice after slice of the pie. The argument is that new TLDs like .biz and .info found very few takers. Even those who did were existing dotcoms who were forced to take them to protect their names. Tim compares the creation of new domain names to that of printing more money, by which the value of money (or in this case, the existing sites) only goes down.

It is easy to see the increasing convergence between mobile phones and computers. This would mean that in the coming years, the mobile phone (or whatever it becomes) would be increasingly used for browsing the Internet. In the longer run, when an integrated device comes into being, content providers would choose a single access point (the primary domain), which would render the .mobi extension useless.

And since the day when that integrated device becomes a reality isn't far, this decision by ICANN makes me wonder, "The question is not whether ICANN or ICANNot. Yes, of course you can. But why?"

Technorati tags: mobi, .mobi, ICANN