WIRELESS TELEPHONY GROWTH COULD BOOST NEW INTERNET DOMAIN NAMES
The growing demand for mobile and Internet Protocol (IP)-based telephony services could be good news for applicants seeking approval for new sponsored top-level domains (sTLDs) in ICANN’s 2nd round of selections, several contenders said Mon. In the first TLD round, in 2000, 4 applicants vied for approval for various telephony-related TLDs, but ICANN directors chose none. Last year, ICANN opened a new contest, and late Fri., it announced 10 contenders, including 3 repeat applicants in the telephony arena.
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The contestants are (1) Mobi JV (.mobi), a group of key players in the mobile industry, including Microsoft, Nokia, Vodafone, 3, GSM Assn., HP, Orange, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Sun Microsystems. (2) Telname Ltd. (.tel), backed by U.K.-based Telnic Ltd. (3) Pulver.com (.tel), of Melville, N.Y. Mobi JV (the proposed joint venture’s working name) wants to create a mobile TLD to streamline the launch of Web sites for mobile Internet usage, it said this month. Telname’s proposal would give individuals and businesses a text-based naming and navigation structure to let them initiate communications or access services by inputting “Adamsmith.Tel or “Hertz.Tel” on their Internet-enabled communications device, the applicant said. A pulver.com TLD would allow legacy telephone numbers to migrate to IP networks so end-users could continue to use phone numbers for both public switched telephone and Internet services, the company said.
The ICANN board considered -- and discarded -- all these ideas in 2000, but applicants say times have changed. Back then, awareness of mobile and IP-based telephony issues was lower, said Khashayar Mahdavi, CEO of Telnic. Now, the application said, the convergence of fixed and mobile networks needs a “unifying naming structure” to meet new end- user demands for richer content and a universal text-based communication identifier where they can store all their contact information. In the absence of such a unifying standard, it said, the industry will become fragmented by “rival and alternative” text-based communications naming systems, creating portability and interoperability problems.
Now that e-numbering has become a reality, pulver.com’s .tel “can happen as well,” said CEO Jeff Pulver. Pulver has been involved in IP communications since 1994, “and while I always thought .tel was a great idea, it works even better today,” he told us. Moreover, he said, the fact that both he and Telnic are “telling the same story about the ‘need’ for the .tel TLD” is good news for both applicants because it “provides additional credibility” for the concept.
Ritva Siren, head of Nokia’s mTLD Initiative agreed times had changed since the last TLD round. Mobile communications and phones have “evolved a lot since that time,” and it’s now “really urgent” to move toward linking services, she said. Consumers don’t want to lug around “heavy packages,” Siren said -- they want small, convenient devices.
Nokia’s 2000 proposal was put together too hurriedly and didn’t fully meet ICANN criteria, Siren said. This time, she said, the company has partnered with other key industry members and has had time to do it right; the application has a great deal of support from the mobile industry. ICANN approval of .mobi won’t conflict with authorization for one or both .tels, she said, because the mobile and telephony industries are different and the .tel proposals are “fairly limited by nature.” She said she hoped ICANN understood big industry players weren’t doing this just “for fun” but because there was a real need for such a TLD.