Who the hell is ever gonna type *.tel into a browser? No-one.

Your average net-monkey has no clue outside .com. Even .co.uk is practically useless.

I wouldn't waste a penny on these .tel charlatans.

in.tel

a quick (and probably inaccurate) check on google suggests there are 27 million .mobi sites out there. Completely pointless tld, but it doesn't take a savant to realise that selling each of those 27 million registrations for a couple of quid each makes you a lot of money...

Now just imagine what will happen when you can create your own TLD for a few hundred thousand...

Say goodbye to the usable internet.

"My name's Paris and I'm rich and blond and I love buying things. Ooh, a new TLD. Out the way everyone! I'm first!"

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Total waste of time and money. Pity the fools that buy this nonsense. What's going to happen when ICANN commence their evil "any TLD" plan? Are businesses going to buy a TLD for every word in the dictionary?

Wake me up when they finally liberalise domain registrations instead of this boring piecemeal release of domain names. There is no real reason why they couldn't just release a wide open nameing convention where the domain name is structured as xxxxxxxxxxxx.yyyyyyyyyyy where the x and y sections can be up to 254 characters.

Just think, you could register the domain iwantparishiltonto.suckonmynob :-)

What if I register natwest.tel, and put my own details into it. People will start calling me, thinking that "what's your account number, sortcode, date of birth [etc]" is an acceptable question for the person at the end of the phone to ask. Obviously banks would be quick to register in a proactive move but smaller companies, etc would probably not. The possibilities for obtaining confidential information are endless.

Not so interesting to cybersquatters but bloody interesting to crooks!

No advertising? I think all it means is me and you won't be able to advertise on them but you know the telcos will. They fall all over themselves with ways to text message you on your cellphones, sell your information to marketing firms (mostly ones they own) and even want to get it to the point of linking the GPS to your phone so when your standing next to a box of corn flakes they will send you a coupon right on the phone. No advertising, hahahahah.

Certainly it will be scammed, theres no way of stopping that 100% on anything.

However I think it will find customers as it already has a pre-cursor. Its not much use on the web, but on phones it may be. Lots of companies already have phone numbers that they advertise like "dial 0800-HOTPIZZA to get, er, hot pizza!" using the letters on the number buttons of a phone. People can never remember phone numbers from a quick advert, so this is similar (but easier to type) e.g. "dial hotpizza.tel for, er, hot pizza"

So it won't carry advertising, but will feature in it instead. Hmmm.

The idea of having a sort of central look up using the DNS system is kinda nice but could be implemented in so many different ways. Having a new TLD is totally unnecessary and the cynical amongst us will know that the higher charge for the first few months is so they can make extra profit from CIOs who feel this is the sort of thing they should be doing.

What's wrong with a standard XML format in a file called contacts.xml that everyone implements on their own domains? It's a bit like robots.txt in that it's foolproof and simple. All we need is an RFC.

The idea that an URL could deliver contact information that then gets updated automatically in other people's databases/phones/Outlook/... is an interesting one.

But the idea that you have to do this on the .tel domain on their terms is a dumb idea.

Instead why not allow any URL to host contact information and just define the XML format that needs to be delivered at that URL. So I can put, say www.linkedin.com/myname/contact on my business card and anyone can plug that into their contact manager to get all of the information I allow them to see.

Read the documentation. I need only quote a single, memorable, domain name to customers. That then returns a load of options and it's their choice how to contact me.

I can see this becoming a verb on a par with Google in a short space of time. I'd buy shares if I went in for that sort of thing.

But I I already use google or yell or scoot or 192... and what is to stop cybersquatters registering the common missspellings as now, and I'm sure that most net users have been shocked out of hopefully typeing in company names or acronyms into the address bar on the off chance that the correct site will appear (Symbian 'phone user).

Just another big scam.