Mobiles get .mobi domain

Web pages designed for mobile phones are to get their own domain, with the suffix .mobi.

The URLs will be assigned next summer and there will be a 90-day honeymoon period which will give owners of registered brands time to register their claim to similarly named .mobi addresses.

The new domain will be managed by a holding company, mTLD Top Level Domain, which was formed by member companies including Hutchison 3, GSM Association, Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung Electronics, T-Mobile and Vodafone. 

Ameet Shah, chairman of the mTLD Top Level Domain board, said: ".mobi will enhance and improve the ease of use of internet-based mobile data services through discoverability, predictability, speed and delivery to market.

"The new .mobi domain will indicate to consumer and enterprise users that the site they are visiting is optimised for the delivery of content and services to mobile devices. This quality assurance will attract users and stimulate internet-based mobile data usage."

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has formally licensed the domain to mTLD Top Level Domain and the group now has to build the infrastructure to manage it for the next 10 years.

Generic titles like travel.mobi and restaurant.mobi will be auctioned off to the highest bidders.

Icann introduced seven new gTLDs in 2000: .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, and .pro. Last month the .xxx domain was set up to handle websites for pornography.