Answering Mr. Griswold
Mr. Griswold, Thank you for your reply. You should look into your mail program's formatting, though; it came out in a manner very difficult to read, at least in the Web presentation on the ICANN site, with lines stretching out way to the right and inconsistent fonts. I send my own mail in a "Keep It Simple, Stupid" lowest-common-denominator format of plain text only and RFC-compliant lines of less than 80 characters. (See my Mail Format site linked from my signature below.) Please launch our demo at: www.telnic.com. I did... past the annoying background music and intense marketing hype, there were some useful phone-based functions demonstrated. However, I didn't really see how any of them required a TLD, or for that matter any DNS naming at all, to operate; what you were demoing seemed to be a mobile portal site containing a personal phone/e-mail directory, a yellow-pages-style business directory, and portal-type links to mobile-supporting sites with things like information and videos. What actual net addresses any of that stuff is at is pretty much irrelevant. You'd be capable of creating such a portal, getting phone operators to use it as their start page for mobile (and stationary) Internet service, and offering listing services to businesses and individuals, without any domain names needing to be assigned specifically for it. > Telnic’s .tel will allow the subscriber, Adam Smith, to register adamsmith.tel > and develop a mini-website of his own or point his .tel domain to > any network operator’s service such as SFR's. And this is different from any other TLD allowing registration of personal vanity domains... how? The .name domain is specifically marketed for that purpose. > Thirdly, you stated that is makes more sense to use a bottom >* *level hostname. While it is technically possible, this approach > leaves open the possibility of creating many potential competing > bottom level hostnames, such as: contact.hertz.com, > tel.hertz.com, wap.hertz.com, mobile.hertz.com, mob.hertz.com, > phone.hertz.com, or info.hertz.com. This environment would not > serve the consumers as they would be required to learn each > content provider’s unique addressing structure. To avoid this > confusion, a single logical structure can only be provided by a > new and unifying ICANN sanctioned sTLD. That would seem to be an argument for the industry establishing a standard hostname for such services and encouraging its widespread use, just like "www" was widely adopted as the hostname for Web sites. This seems no more difficult than convincing an industry to adopt use of a TLD designated for it; thus far, such specialized TLDs as .museum and .aero have had some difficulty getting widespread adoption in their respective communities. > Fourthly, you have stated that the .mobi and .tel proposals are > essentially the same. Not really; I just said they seemed very similar, and had overlapping (though not entirely identical) target communities. Yours encompasses telephones in general, stationary as well as mobile (though the most widespread use of telephone-based Internet services is likely to be from mobile phones given that stationary phones are likely to be near full-size computers), while .mobi is for mobile devices (which might include PDAs as well as phones). On the other hand, your demo mentioned things like PalmPilots, so your own proposal seems to encompass more mobile devices than strictly phones.
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