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.mobi to get a new rival in .mobile

Kevin Murphy, October 15, 2025, Domain Registries

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.

.mobile will be restricted after Donuts loses auction to Dish DBS

Kevin Murphy, March 15, 2016, Domain Registries

The contention set for the new gTLD .mobile has been resolved, seemingly by private auction, with Dish DBS emerging victorious.
The portfolio registry withdrew its application at the weekend, leaving the satellite TV provider the only remaining applicant.
This means that .mobile will be a restricted gTLD, available only to vetted members of the mobile telephony industry.
Dish had originally proposed .mobile as a so-called “closed generic”, in which it would be the registry and only registrant, but changed its application last year.
It’s a similar story to .phone, which Dish also won.
Dish applied for 13 gTLDs. It withdrew two applications, and 10 others are either in pre-delegation testing or ICANN contracting.