Recent Posts
- .mobi to get a new rival in .mobile
- Bye-bye .boomer! Blockchain players abandon new gTLD plans
- Decades-old US registrar gets a spanking
- love.you sold in apparent five-figure deal
- Bogus harassment complaints could get you an ICANN ban
- ICANN slaps open-mic ban on conflicted lawyers
- Final GTFO warning for 19 failed new gTLD bids
- Nominet opens $500,000 fund for open source projects
- Com Laude buys larger rival Markmonitor
- Epik took down Charlie Kirk doxing site
- Number of subsidized gTLD bidders far lower than thought
- Another registrar goes AWOL
- gTLD loses its second-largest registrar after breach
- Com Laude buys Fairwinds
- Unstoppable wants to be a registry back-end
- Sixteen new gTLD bids could face the firing squad
- Registry to release one-letter domains tomorrow
- New ICANN funding rules will cost smaller ccTLDs more
- .ai rival lines up gTLD bid
- Team Internet lays off 200
- Sixteen more orgs vie for cheap gTLDs, but…
- So who’s registering sunrise domains these days?
- Cloud gTLD gets launch dates
- Governments say new gTLD program “credibility” at stake
- NIXI planning doomed new gTLD bids
- AI experts replace Chapman on ICANN board
- RDRS may not be dead
- Single-letter .com lawsuit thrown out of court
- Golding challenges McCarthy for Nominet board seat
- Three applicants qualify for cheapo gTLDs
- Blockchain crisis looming for new gTLD next round
- Two more dot-brands leave Verisign for GoDaddy
- ICANN looking at new bulk reg rules
- Reseller loss hits Tucows’ DUM but not revenue
- GoDaddy counts cost of losing .co deal
- Wine producers worried about new gTLDs
- Goodyear tires of its dot-brand
- Team Internet loses Radix to Tucows
- ICANN’s “review of reviews” kicks off
- Huge registrars flee from RDRS
- Namecheap loses attempt to bring back .org price caps
- Registrar shamed for alleged crypto abuse neglect
- Poblete’s ICANN board seat safe
- .com off to strong start in Q3
- .my is growing like crazy
- ICANN settles $77 million sexual harassment suit
- Chinese domain spikiness ends in first half
- Registrars agree to higher ICANN fees
- ICANN to review reviews after review review request fails
- Got junk? June’s biggest gTLD growers do
- ICANN ditches Oman due to Middle-East conflicts
- ICANN’s mighty overlord flexes on transparency
- ICANN faces first pushback over DEI U-turn
- Loads of firms flunk out of next-round gTLD back-end program
- presidenttrump.xxx among thousands of dead .xxx domains suddenly springing to life
- One of the dumbest gTLDs just switched back-ends
- GoDaddy loses .co to Team Internet
- Governments erect bulk-reg barrier to new gTLD next round
- Little interest in cheapo gTLD program
- US government opposes most new gTLDs
- GoDaddy loses last Amazon business to Identity Digital
- Third Amazon gTLD launch dates revealed
- .TOP promises to play nice on DNS abuse
- Court denies ICANN’s #MeToo “cover up” attempt
- Launch dates for two more Amazon gTLDs revealed
- An end to “Club Med for geeks” ICANN?
- Some people paid premiums for .hot domain hacks
- .io questions in sharp focus as UK signs Chagos treaty
- Big .gdn registrar at risk
- ICANN “reaffirms its commitment to diversity and inclusion”
- ICANN kills off diversity and inclusion
- Kaufmann picked for ICANN board
- Conflicted? STFU under new ICANN rules
- .hot is for hookers? Amazon’s first premium regs revealed
- Gname adds another 200 registrars
- New Pope’s .com domain was registered the day Francis died
- Two deadbeat registrars get their ICANN marching orders
- DotMusic has sold a lot of names, but not many are turned on
- .med is a deeply weird gTLD, but it wants to be more normal
- ICANN cuts off money to UASG
- Web.com getting dumped
- .es and .pt riding out massive power outage
- .com is back as Verisign discounts bear fruit
- Dot-brand actually being used to get deleted
- Verisign gave Trump $100,000
- Private Whois requests hit new low after Tucows quits RDRS
- Zoom says GoDaddy took it down for hours
- The Soviet Union might be safe after all
- Google says its ccTLDs “are no longer necessary”
- Facebook thinks ICANN is a bit rubbish
- ICANN spending $365,000 a year on coffee and booze
- Regulator going after suicide site that even Epik banned
- .ai sees $600,000 auction sales in a month
- Pru trims its dot-brand portfolio
- UK’s Nigel Hickson has died
- .blog registry ordered to change name to Knock Knock RDAP There
- WordPress buys Canadian, swaps CentralNic for CIRA
- Latest ICANN salary porn ruins my terrible pun
- .co deal worth $77 million up for grabs
- I get a wrongful kicking as .su registry denies turn-off plan
- Sales and profits dip at Team Internet
- Four deadbeat registrars get terminated
- “No timeline” to retire Soviet Union from the DNS
- ICANN to kill off 60-day domain transfer lock
- Lancaster bags up its dot-brand
- Google readying its next batch of gTLD launches?
- NomCom confirms Americans rejected from ICANN board
- Nova announces $45 million of new gTLD applications
- Registry makes .ai an option for Koreans
- it.com now bigger than Guatemala
- ICANN turns to AI and crowdsourcing for new gTLD program
- Amazon lawyer DiBiase elected to ICANN board
- Is .io safe now? Identity Digital now running Mauritian ccTLD
- Tucows quits ICANN’s Whois disclosure pilot
- Toshiba goes all-in on its dot-brand
- Google scuppers Team Internet acquisition after profit warning
- .ai channel doubles under new management
- Trump inclined to back deal that threatens .io
- As .com shrinks, China adds another 1.2 million domains
- Second new gTLD contention set revealed
- UK intros global domain takedown law
- No more Americans as Holland wins ICANN board seat
- Registries have started shutting down Whois
- ICANN wins IRP because complainant literally doesn’t exist
- .com could return to growth this quarter
.mobi to get a new rival in .mobile
There’s a new registry player in town. Dish DBS is preparing to launch the .mobile gTLD, which has been dormant for almost a decade, according to notes on its web site.
The first phase of the launch — sunrise — has been pencilled in for 30 days from November 10. If ICANN’s been informed of the launch dates, it has not yet officially published them on its own web site.
The launch plan would see a limited registration period targeting mobile phone operators running until early February. That would be followed by a 12-day Early Access Period and a February 19 general availability launch.
The plan is to have .mobile a fully open unrestricted space positioned as a “modern, mobile-first domain extension designed for life in motion – perfect for creators, startups, professionals, and forward-thinking brands.”
I’m expecting this to be the first of several launches from Dish, which has been sitting on a portfolio of a dozen gTLDs — the others are .sling, .dish, .latino, .dot, .ott, .ollo, .blockbuster, .dtv, .dvr, .phone, and .data — from the 2012 round.
Dish seems to be deep in bed with Tucows, its back-end registry services partner, on the revitalized portfolio.
The launch of .mobile of course will be viewed in the context of .mobi almost two decades ago, which was hyped at a time of gTLD scarcity and heavily speculated.
Now under Identity Digital, .mobi peaked at over 1.2 million registered domains in 2013 but has been in a death spiral ever since as investors cut their losses. It now sits at around 265,000 domains.
The original plan for .mobi, which was applied for four years before the launch of the first iPhone, was to provide a namespace where phone users could be assured that a site would be compatible with their phones. It looks incredibly naive in hindsight.
Dish did not have the same idea for .mobile. It wanted .mobile as a single-registrant space where only itself and its affiliates could register names, but that plan was scuppered when ICANN retroactively banned such models.
Domain Incite relies on support from readers like you to survive. Please consider making a one-off or recurring donation via PayPal. Please support Domain Incite, the independent source of news, analysis and opinion for the domain name industry and ICANN community.
Recent Comments