Comments on “dotMobi starts giving away domains” • The Register

Comments on: dotMobi starts giving away domains

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.mobi is the next spam TLD #

By David Harper Posted Tuesday 10th July 2007 11:10 GMT

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.

The Difference #

By Jack Moxley Posted Tuesday 10th July 2007 13:19 GMT

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.

Re The Difference #

By David Harper Posted Tuesday 10th July 2007 13:59 GMT

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.

HTML vs. WML #

By Daniel Ballado-Torres Posted Wednesday 11th July 2007 02:49 GMT

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...

Checking dotMobi compliance #

By James Pearce Posted Wednesday 11th July 2007 12:48 GMT

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