Tim Berners-Lee, widely credited with creating the World Wide Web, published a paper criticizing the wireless industry’s attempts to create “.mobi,” a mobile-specific Internet domain name. The Technical Advisory Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which develops and evaluates Internet technologies, voiced its support for Berners-Lee’s position.
Officials from Nokia Corp. and Microsoft Corp.-two of the main proponents for the mobile-specific domain name-were not immediately available for comment.
In his paper, Berners-Lee said the Web should not be broken down into various sub-groups, but should instead be as universally accessible as possible. He said many Internet sites are already accessible to a variety of devices, and it is unreasonable to expect businesses to maintain a variety of domain names, from .com to .net to .mobi.
“Dividing the Web into information destined for different devices, or different classes of user, or different classes of information, breaks the Web in a fundamental way,” wrote Berners-Lee. “The Web must operate independently of the hardware, software or network used to access it, of the perceived quality or appropriateness of the information on it, and of the culture, and language, and physical capabilities of those who access it.”
Berners-Lee said the .mobi domain name would serve only to fracture the Web, and it would create unnecessary differences between mobile companies and other types of companies.
“A travel agent should be a travel business, not a ‘mobile business,’ ” he wrote. “In a reasonable world, the travel agent gets on with selling flights and not worrying about whether a customer is attached by a wire. In a reasonable world, a phone is a phone, and the particular electromagnetics used to connect it to another phone are totally uninteresting compared to the fact that a person is connected to another person.”
Earlier this year, a group of the wireless industry’s largest players announced plans to form a domain-name registry company for the mobile Internet-an agency similar to the Internet’s ICANN registry company-to simplify Internet access from mobile phones. The group filed for the .mobi top-level domain name through the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is the association that registers Internet addresses. Top-level domains include Internet addresses ending in .com, .org, .net and others. Microsoft, Nokia, Vodafone, 3, GSM Association, Hewlett-Packard Co., Orange, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Sun Microsystems Inc. were among the companies promoting the mobile-specific top-level domain name.
“The creation of a mobile top-level domain would allow consumers to access the Internet in very different mobility scenarios, whether the access is provided by mobile operator, Internet service provider or various gateway devices at home or enterprise,'” explained Pertti Korhonen, Nokia’s senior vice president and chief technology officer, earlier this year. “The wide industry participation highlights the shared objective of offering seamless global access and interoperability of mobile services and applications.”
