.mobi's Sales Yardstick Once Again Shows It's All About The Money

Scams

from the transparent dept

A number of new top-level domains have been introduced over the past few years, like .jobs, .travel and .eu, but unsurprisingly, they haven’t been particularly popular, except with domain squatters. Registrars and companies that promote new TLDs feed on this, knowing that most big companies will simply go out and buy up domain names containing their names and trademarks of any new TLD, not because they have any interest in using them, but just to keep them out of the hands of squatters and to avoid getting into disputes over ownership, or having to buy them back at inflated prices later. It’s been pretty clear from the outset that one such new TLD, .mobi, intended for web sites aimed at users on mobile devices, has been about little more than the money, despite the protestations of the company behind it. Everything the company has done is geared towards wringing as much money out of the process as possible: .mobi domains carry a higher cost than many other domains, supposedly to cut down on cybersquatting; registrations of trademarks made during the “sunrise” period carried an even greater cost; the company held back 5,000 common words and phrases it will auction off, saying that will ensure a fairer distribution than a first-come, first-served policy and not mentioning it will maximize revenue (while saying it’s not a money-grab because they could have held even more names back); putting out a call for advisors on the mobile web, but only if they can pay. But the truth remains that .mobi really does nothing to advance the mobile internet, and all it does is compel companies to snap up more domains they don’t need and don’t really want.

Public registration of .mobi domains began this week — at premium prices, of course, during the “landrush” phase — and plenty of people are asking why anybody would need one. The general counsel of Verizon says the company bought its .mobi domains simply to ward off squatters, as it feels forced to do with any new TLD, while a VeriSign exec says companies should buy the domains for similar reasons, and to avoid dealing with disputes later. The head of mTLD again repeats the claim that .mobi won’t be attractive to cybersquatters because of the prohibitively high cost — again repeating how the solution to some problem involves mTLD getting more money. But it’s doubtful the plan worked, as 88,000 .mobi names were registered in the first two days, signaling a lot of interest from squatters, as it’s totally unrealistic to assume that there’s that much pent-up interest to offer mobile web sites, when so many solutions that don’t involve paying for a new domain already exist. Of course, the CEO of mTLD paints the figure as a sign of .mobi’s success, saying it took .com “years to do 100,000 names.” But, if mTLD’s motives were as pure and altruistic as they’d have us all believe, their measure of success for the domain would be how many .mobi sites are actually deployed — not how many domains they sell, which may or may not ever be used. Once again, the comments make it clear that all of mTLD’s comments about driving the mobile web forward and how they just want to make things great and wonderful for mobile users are nothing more than a smokescreen. It’s measuring the success of .mobi on sales, not on its actual use, because, once again, the money it gets is all that matters.