+ =

Actually, I since discovered that “SuperDex” is the trademarked name of a chromatography product, so that potential brand name is in-use and not available!

Perhaps some other brand name could result from the theoretic union of yellow pages companies, like “SuperKnows” or “DexMedia”. Maybe even “DexPages” or “SuperOne”!

It would probably be ultimately least expensive to keep one dominant brand name — I think Superpages has more brand equity overall, so that’s what I would vote towards.

If the domain name aptly represents the industry or niche it does business in, it can get direct traffic where users type it into the address bar and reach the site. It also represents your company in cyberspace and is the first port of call online.

There are two tricky issue involved in the buying of domains. The first is that you cannot use comparable sales figures (as in the case of real estate). The second is the intrinsic value of the domain name itself (as in the case of vehicle, jewellery etc). These are intangibles and cannot be used as bargaining chips at the negotiating table.

This post is based on an interesting writeup by James Siminoff, webpreneur and owner of phonetag.com and grid.com. James spent over $100,000 on grid.com and feels that valuable domains can be found for $10. The domain vibrator.com sold for $1 million and of late, toys.com sold for $1.25 million.

James has used his personal experiences in buying domains to arrive at a step by step process that should help you secure the domain you want.

1) Brainstorm Domain Names:
Maintain a list of the niches that interest you. When you look for short attractive names, chances are that they are taken most of the time. But the variations or combinations of those domain names can still be available. To help in your quest, James mentions a great resource called Dotomator.com

2) Check for availability of domains of interest:
Godaddy is a big player in the domain name registration business. You can use their bulk upload features to upload your list of domain names. The interface will tell you which domains are available and which domains have been taken.

Another good domain registration service is instantdomainsearch.com where availability of .com. .net and .org domains can be ascertained and a direct link to Godaddy site for registration of availbale domains is included. You can also do an encrypted search on this site.

3) Visit the auctioneer sites:
Domaintools.com provides a whois lookup of all expired, current and deleted domains. Sedo.com is an excellent site where you search for availability of domains and also park, buy and sell domain names.

4) Prune your domain list:
Domains can be broadly classified into four categories.

a) Real Business:
These are domains used for existing businesses. Such domains are very hard to get as they serve existing business interests. James mentions that he bought the domain trustme.com from an existing business and it was a hard slog getting it and increased the price as well.

b) Domain Squatter pages:
This is a common practice as people look at it as a business venture. Registering the maximum number of possible variations of a word as domains at $10 per head per annum gets the owner revenue if these domains are parked on sedo.com for example and sedo also gets to share the revenue with the owner. A good example is the Kauai.us domain.

Kauai is the oldest of the main Hawaiian islands and is a tourist destination of immense interest. A screenshot of the kauai.us site shows it is a parked domain monetised for Asdsense with the owner hoping that someone would want to hopefully buy it at the “right” price in future.

Such sites are easy to buy as most of them are up for sale. In the above example, there is a Buy this domain sign.

c) Pages with Site Under Construction sign:
There are two ways about it. Either a business is preparing its site for launch or a person has registered it and forgotten about it. Such domains are ideal to target. James has had good success with such domains.

d) Dead Pages:
Nothing comes up when the domain name is typed into the address bar. It is hard to predict whether it is available or not. James talks about the case of nobel.com, a domain owned by an insurance company. He already owned nobelcom.com and he figured it would cost him a fortune if he contacted the CEO about it.

Contacting the VP of the IT divison helped him plead at a human level and the company consented to sell the domain to him. James picked up the domain in lieu of something that would have cost $50,000 or more.

5) Contact the owner:
If a site is for sale, the link displayed or contact us link should enable you to contact the owner. Such messages have a higher success rate in making contact. Use the Wayback Machine to look at the old pages and contact details.

If unsuccessful, use the standard whois on a site like domaintools.com. It also offers a historical whois version.

6) Various approaches to contacting the domain owner:
James feels it is best to contact the owner first and find out if the domain is for sale and not make an offer straightaway.

a) Direct Contact:
If the owner is a student or someone who cannot be searched for on Google, then direct contact is the best way. James says that when he bought the domain grid.com, he had a hard time tracking down the real owner and accidentally revealed his webpreneur details to the owner by email. This mistake raised the stakes by about $50,000.

So, if you have documented success as a buyer, you are best not to reveal it as the status of the buyer can impact the final price.

b) Hiding your details:
A cheap way of making contact with the owner is throug a gmail or yahoo account with username as a pseudonym and the email signed with a name like Joe. This does not elicit much contact from the owner as you may appear to be a scammer.

An expensive way of doing this is through paid services which allow you to mask your details when contacting the owner. Godaddy and Networksolutions offer such services. James has had no success using this technique.

c) Optimal way is to hire a PR or law firm:
Hiring a small town law firm or PR firm has given James the best success in clinching domains like trustme.com and phonetag.com The service costs between $100 and $300. The owner can see she is contacted by a real person from a company and this prevents the price from getting inflated.

7) Domain Valuation:
James says that he has no comparables to evaluate domain name prices. It all boils down to what the owner is asking for. James does not have a budget in mind when approaching owners as he looks at them as assets as in real estate.

8.A rough guide to evaluate the domain name:
a) Number of letters in the domain name:
3 to 4 letter domain names are expensive and can sell between $5,000 and $500,000. A name with 5 letters and more becomes cheaper.

b) Number of words in the domain:
One word domain is high value. The more the number of words, the less valuable it becomes.

c) Easy to spell:
The easier it is to spell the domain name, the more valuable it is.

d) Reason for typing the domain name into the browser:
James draws a parallel between college.com and phonetag.com (he owns the latter). It would be worth getting a traffic analysis report from Compete.com The natural search traffic to college.com woud be much higher compared to phonetag.com

e) Natural flow of the domain name:
The more natural the flow of words is, the higher the domain would appreciate in value. James points out that a word like phone tag would be more natural than a random flow like micro soft (separated by a space).

f) How does this domain name affect your business?
A better domain name is more viral and easy to remember reducing customer acquisition costs. The worth of each customer and the current acquisition cost of each customer need to be factored into the final value.

9) Negotiation:
a) Reacting to ridiculous offers:
James mentions that the owner of bulk.com wanted $800,000 and he offered $35,000. The sale did not go through but owners can be sitting on their high perches with overexpectations.

b) I am not sure – what do you think?
The owner who has this question wants to negotiate for sure. James says he goes in at 20 to 30% below the bottom range of his budget.

NOTE: There can be legal issues here. If you write back saying you can buy it for $5,000 it becomes a legal contract that can be enforced in court. James advises that it is good to put in a rider something like – I can buy for $5,000 pending all terms are agreeable.

c) Spooking the seller:
If you agree to a price straightaway, then the owner is bound to develop sellers remorse concluding that he has underpriced the domain than what it is truly worth. James had this problem when buying grid.com and had to sue the owner to enforce the contract (out of court). Rather than get into legal situations, you would be well off negotiating the price down with the owner.

d) If the price is right:
If you feel that the seller’s price is close to the market price, then there is no need to be over cautious about it. Just settle for it.

10) Get the agreement:
If the seller says yes to your offer, then it is a contract that is enforceable in court. Get the assent in writing. Once that is done, open up an escrow account at escrow.com and transfer the funds at the earliest. The quicker this is done, the harder it is for the seller to back out.

Enjoy the original writeup for 10 tips to buy a domain in its entirety. You cannot fail if you follow this process to the best of your ability depending on your individual cirumstances.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search marketing company offering both natural search and paid search services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

Back in 2004, I laughed and laughed and laughed, and I told coworkers that it was a huge waste of money, because, I said, “they won’t be able to buy themselves into the top position for searches for ‘Yellow Pages’”. SuperPages.com long held that distinction under my SEO direction, and I knew that purchasing the term in a domain name alone would not depose all the work we’d done to rank tops for it. As time passed, however, yellowpages.com has indeed deposed the Superpages forerunner.

Still, the domain name didn’t accomplish this alone. There were a mixture of factors involved. AT&T used a considerable war chest of new capital to gain marketshare in the YP space. I believe they likely undercut other players and made major traffic deals with partners in order to gain greater traffic — so, some of their position was purchased. Also, the AT&T company has much greater prestige and far more customers than the previous owners of the “yellowpages.com” domain name, and they could leverage their print phone book covers to further promote the URL. This meant that far more people were inclined to link to them, and the domain name itself, embedded in all those inlinks, gave AT&T a defacto advantage in the PageRank game.

Further, Google itself shifted ranking factors slightly between now and 2004, placing a bit greater weight upon keyword terms within domain names.

And, after I left the Superpages, a number of my recommendations for ongoing SEO were neglected to some degree by the people overseeing such work. This resulted in Superpages getting deposed from its longtime slot as first position for “yellow pages”, and Yellowpages.com has been occupying that position for a while since.

Just for the sake of egos and prestige value, it might appear on the surface that AT&T’s investment in the yellowpages.com domain name was justified in order for them to achieve top ranking. But, this is the world of business, and considering the direction in which society and commerce has been shifting, their purchase of that old domain name and the more recent purchase of YP.com appear to be at a hyper-inflated cost that is way out of whack with any good business rationale.

First, I know for a fact that they never have gotten sufficient value from that original $100 million dollar domain name. Knowing exactly how much traffic goes to the top position for “yellow pages”, I know that it’s never paid for itself, and it’s unlikely to do so. (Okay, so I know that they also got a number of other business assets along with the domain in that original $100 mill price-tag, but even considering that, this domain was a very bad buy.)

I’ve written previously about the decline in user searches for “yellow pages”, and that decline is continuing:

(Google Trends graph shows ongoing erosion of user searches for “yellow pages”)

Fewer and fewer users are typing “yellow pages” into Google, as this graph demonstrates. It would’ve taken “yellowpages.com” a good many years to repay for itself even when the traffic for “yellow pages” keyword searches was good, but with this declining trend in those searches very apparent, this is no longer a realistic longterm investment, and it will turn more rapidly into a major capital loss.

Considering this ongoing, downward trend, the monetary worth and traffic-bearing value of both “yellowpages.com” and “yp.com” are declining. Many feel that the overall concept of “yellow pages” could be fast disappearing as well, and that will leave these as very dated-feeling trademarks only a short ways down the road. I’d say there are a very good number of young consumers today who don’t even know what “yellow pages” is! So, even the brand name value of these appears very short-lived.

I’m doubting that even the short term, ostensible existing traffic of YP.com is worth this $3.85 million price tag.

If I were an AT&T stockholder, I think I’d be mad enough about this to demand an accounting. With a number of major yellow pages companies experiencing significant business problems currently, this purchase is just incomprehensible. But, since AT&T’s yellow pages business unit is still attached to their telephone company, perhaps they have the luxury of wasteful spending on this piece.

Not long ago, I wrote an article on how some local directory sites were using subdomains in an attempt to achieve good ranking results in search engines. In that article, I concluded that most of these sites were ranking well for other reasons not directly related to the presence of the keyword as a subdomain — I showed some examples of sites which ranked equally well or better in many cases where the keyword was a part of the URI as opposed to the subdomain. So, in Google, subdirectories were already functioning just as well as subdomains for the purposes of keyword rank optimization.

I’ve seen a lot of sites which had varying degrees of quality in their subdomaining strategies. If you do have subdomains, you should ideally insure that they contain primarily unique content not reflected on your other domains — each subdomain should contain page content that does not also live on other subdomains or else it can appear that you are attempting to spam the search engine indices.

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines are very clear on this subject:

“Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

Most large corporate websites have some level of accidental duplicate content, but if you deploy dozens or hundreds of subdomains with all dupe text, it will appear that you’re purposefully trying to spam the search engines — don’t do it.

If you are considering how to structure your URLs and site content for natural search marketing, I’d say you might be better off just using a simple format of descriptively keyworded directories and subdirectories rather than keyworded subdomains. This is often easier to manage, and it looks a lot more natural/reasonable from the search engines’ perspective. There’s lower likelihood of accidentally mirroring/duplicating your content, too.

Don’t freak out if you have a few subdomains — this is also natural. Many major websites host different site sections and applications on subdomains, and some have external providers delivering content on separate servers — it’s very easy in those cases to assign a subdomain to the third party that’s providing service for you. As long as you’re not duplicating the main content of your pages on the subdomains, this is fine.
Finally, I’ve had a number of people ask my opinion regarding foreign languages — which is better, subdomain or subdirectory.

I actually prefer using separate top-level domains (“TLDs”) for this purpose, since it allows you to send a very clear signal to the search engines that particular content is intended for various countries. For instance, your French language pages could be delivered on .FR domains like: www.example.fr

However, if for some reason you don’t wish to use foreign TLDs for your alternate language pages, you should not worry overly about using separate subdomains versus directory/subdirectories. “french.example.com” will likely function just as well as “www.example.com/french/” in my opinion. I believe that translated versions of pages are NOT counted as duplicate content because they essentially contain very different text. Yes, the information may be duplicated, but the text content is not, and pages in two different languages are far less likely to both come us as relevent for the same keyword search.

So, for foreign language pages, I recommend separate TLDs for best performance, or else use whatever approach is easiest for you to set up and maintain.

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It’s not all that surprising that Verizon might do this, since they oppose net neutrality, but for users like myself, this is highly undesirable. I’ve been highly complimentary about Verizon’s FiOS service, because I’ve had excellent speed and high quality from it. I work from home providing expertise around internet technologies, so it’s vital that I be able to clearly experience the internet just as the majority of the rest of internet users out there, so having Verizon meddling with what’s delivered up to me is not cool.

If you all recall, another company did something quite similar to this back in 2003: Verisign previously did something quite similar when they abruptly launched their “Site Finder” service which intercepted all queries to mistyped/nonexistent .COM and .NET domain names and redirected users to a similar sort of search results page that they controlled. Verisign’s action was heavily criticized for interfering with many systems’ processes which expect incorrect domain requests to error out, and VeriSign agreed to suspend the service after ICANN pressured them to halt it.

Now, Verizon’s action isn’t quite as serious, but it’s the very same sort of thing, and while it doesn’t impact the entire internet, it does impact a great many of us who work from home or do hobby programming of various sorts. It’s a bit too little, too late to point out that users can opt out of this, too.

Now, I have my IE browser configged such that it uses a particular service when auto-correcting for this sort of thing, but I don’t have this set up in FireFox, and in that browser I’m getting that Verizon page.

Verizon is making money off of ads delivered on that search results page, so this was intentionally done to their already-paying subscribers in order to increase profits. Unfortunately, a great many of us do not want this sort of “assistance” when browsing the internet, and we get irritable when companies are aggressively inserting themselves between us and the normal process of interacting with the internet.

By the way – for one mistyped domain I did, it appeared that InfoSpace was powering the search results. For another, it was Yahoo! powering the search. I’d suggest that neither of those companies should associate themselves with this sort of business. InfoSpace results:

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Verizon: not cool! I shouldn’t have to go in and opt-out of this sort of thing, and you should’ve notified me in advance before interfering with my internet access. Are you using the same software that the Chinese goverment uses to control their citizen’s internet access?

Verizon has tried to fight off net neutrality through propaganda, issuing statements like that of Peter Davidson, Verizon’s senior vice president for federal government relations:

“…Net Neutrality – better named Net Regulation – is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist…”

Um…. they’re just not convincing me with stuff like what they’ve done in this example.

One of the main things that I’m pleased about was my effort to be as objective as possible in writing the article — not only did I want to report on what is going on in local-oriented domaining, and who’s involved, but also to provide some concrete conclusions and recommendations which people could take away. I was upfront in disclosing my past negative bias about domaining, and in the course of writing the article I found that I had to revise my assumptions a few times over – in favor of Domaining, actually. Working off and on, I wrote the article over the course of about two months.

While doing the research, I became aware that the Domaining industry seems to have a bit of “younger sibling complex” — as an industry, they wish to be considered a respectable, bona fide line of business. Unfortunately, they have a few things which have been hampering that aim to some degree:

1. Many people have been exposed to cybersquatting, typosquatting, and trojan-horse sites which have damaged the public’s perception of domainers. While a number of companies have been springing up which have highly ethical practices and do only high-quality domaining, the industry’s been sand-bagged by the past sins of a lot of anonymous individuals who have exploited domain names for a fast buck.
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2. The industry has been disrespected by a degree due to the perception that domaining isn’t very sophisticated. This isn’t really accurate, since the top domaining companies frequently have very sophisticated tools and processes for selecting domains, registering domains, hosting and deploying content on domains, and algorithms for estimating the traffic potential of domain names. Further, on the face of it, that bias isn’t really fair — someone who’s developed an elegant, simpler method for making money should be admired so long as it’s not a criminal method.
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3. There’s little independent reporting of domain industry traffic figures. This is a case where there are significant challenges to independent reporting agencies in identifying “domaining” traffic from other types of traffic, since one has to assume varying amounts of user motivations in going to domains directly — this is something that Danny Sullivan mentioned in my article’s comments in reference to the Visual Sciences statistics — and, there are tech reasons why traffic sometimes has referrers stripped out — so, the few figures currently published on direct domain traffic are not clearly all attributable to domaining. In addition, a number of the top domaining companies have valid reasons for avoiding the disclosure of all the domain names in their portfolios since that could reveal some competitive intelligence about their strategies and proprietary processes.

Since the domaining industry is a bit defensive/insecure about how the public perceives them, it wasn’t really a surprise that my article immediately attracted some criticism from folks. Frank Schilling, in his Seven Mile blog, posted a write up about my article called “Search Engine Land of Make Believe“. In it, he mentions a number of positive figures about direct navigation traffic, but none of the figures are very reliable.

He mentions one figure about large amounts of Yahoo ad usage coming in from domain name traffic, though it’s apparently from an analyst’s estimate — and Wall Street analysts typically do not understand how internet metrics are computed, and particularly don’t understand the issues involved in lumping all types of apparent direct navigation traffic in together (no independent traffic reporting agency I know of can differentiate between traffic coming in from a user typing in a domain name versus clicking on one of their favorited bookmarks, and we won’t even go into all the situations where referrers are not being passed due to browser/platform security settings).

Another figure he cites is an Efficient Frontier report on direct navigation, though others have already pointed out a number of issues with accepting that report at face value. The graph I see in the report actually shows a pretty sharp degradation in conversions after a few months of the ads running — a normal enough progression since CTRs typically drop off as users become more familiar with the ads, though not not a progression that I would expect if the majority of the traffic on those sites were from new users visiting them for the first time through directly typing in assumed domain names.

Finally, he cites an anecdotal mention from someone within Google quoted on how AdSense was seeing 5 million unique visits per day from the domain distribution channel, but if we assume that number is still accurate today and compare it with comScore’s estimated number of Unique Visitors to Google for May (120,010,000), it’s not all that significant. It’s also not all that interesting if you compare it to the total estimated number of worldwide internet users. So, Frank doesn’t really convince us that things are fantastic with these figures.

So, the reason why I or any other informed analyst or tech reporter would write a cautious and conservative article about domaining is that there’s just a lack of independent validation of the traffic figures, along with something of an inability for collective assessment of true conversion quality. As Danny noted in his comment on Frank’s posting, advertisers can’t opt out of this subset of Google’s nonsearch traffic, and parked domains are not segmented out in reporting stats.

My conservative assessment is merely based on the amount of independent data at-hand, and not on a bias in favor of search traffic. For all of us who lived through all the hype associated with the radical new business models that were promoted during the dot-com boom some years ago, we remember all too well the implosion of the dot-com bubble. The lesson we learned was to focus on the business model and on good statistical evidence from objective sources.

Frank’s hope that:

“Perhaps one day I will visit ‘Search Engine Land’ (the website) and read a less cautious piece that accurately portrays the domain name traffic industry and gives it much deserved respect….”

isn’t all that likely to happen until there is a greater degree of transparency and more solid, independent reporting on traffic and collective conversion rates.

I conclude in the article that there’s significant traffic in domaining networks of sites, and that there’s good money to be made from it for local business companies. But, I suggest caution in monitoring of the quality of that traffic and its associated conversion rate (real conversion rates – not just CTR). I should have also suggested that not all domainer companies should be considered the same — some are great, while others have portfolios full of scummier sites that publicly-traded companies would want to avoid. I actually am impressed with some of the businesses in the industry such as SEDO (who were quite admirable in their recent efforts to police the domaining of names purchased by the unscrupulous in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings), and REIT impresses me as well. In any case, I didn’t beat anyone up in the article, and I gave the whole thing as fair a shake as I could.

The domainer industry doesn’t need unqualified, glowing reports from analysts and reporters like me — they can continue to laugh all the way to the bank with the money they’re likely generating. But, if they do wish to get more approval and admiration as an industry, there is a way to accomplish it.

Independent traffic reporting companies are currently unable to assess and report on the traffic for the overall industry, or for particular large companies within domaining.

So, Domainers, if you want to prove to everyone the amount of traffic going through your industry, I suggest that you partner with comScores, Nielsen/Netratings, and Hitwise and talk to them about how they might be able to better identify and report upon your traffic. Most likely, this would require that a number of domaining companies would need to team up in order to report all of their domains to those metrics companies after which the traffic reporting firms would be able to group together usage data collectively. Perhaps the domainers could supply their domain portfolio lists to an independent agency, such as the Internet Commerce Association, which could then privately provide the collective list to the reporting agencies.

So, how about it, domainers?  If you want to really make the eyes of CEOs and investors shoot open everywhere, move out of the shadows and get some more independent reporting on what’s going on with all of your many sites!

What is that, you might ask? It’s a simple proposal for sites to do away with using the WWW-dot-domainname format for URLs, and to instead go with the non-WWW version of domains instead. Managing your site’s main domain/subdomain name is one basic piece of search engine optimization, and this initiative can be a guide for how to decide which domain name will become the dominant one for a site. Read on for more info…

I think there are strong arguments in favor of dropping the “dub-dub-dub” because use of a domain with it is not really necessary. Most sites are set up so that either primary domain name will resolve to the same pages.

http://www.example.com/

http://example.com/

Removal of the WWW can help streamline pagecode which can reduce data transfer and speed up page load times. (Admittedly, the removal of the WWWs only improves data transfer and page load by relatively insignificant amounts in the majority of cases, but such seemingly minor changes could have very large impacts for large-scale sites which deliver millions of pages per day, and the cumulative reduction of data transferred might even result in some tiny reduction in one’s ISP hosting service costs.) And, it is visually cleaner to lose the WWW when citing a company’s URL in print and other marketing collateral where the domain or URL needs to be displayed.

Since the major search engines have been handling both types of URLs relatively consistently, I think it might be useful to use the No-WWW philosophy when you work on canonicalizing your WWW/No-WWW domain names. As you may be aware, many sites have both the WWW and non-WWW versions of their URLs in play simultaneously. For purposes of SEO, one should have one redirect to the other so that you have one primary, or “canonical” version of your main domain, and all your PageRank can be applied to pages delivered on that domain instead of being spread thinner across both versions. But, which version — with WWW, or without WWW — should be your primary? The No-WWW initiative provides a good reason to choose one above the other.

If you’re considering joining this effort, there’s no reason to do this in a costly manner. Your IT support personnel can typically set up redirection with relatively minor effort, so beginning the conversion process to drop the WWWs from all page code and application interfaces doesn’t have to be done in sync. Using 301 redirects will work for SEO and insure that all the legacy URLs will continue to work for users. Then, over time, convert the URLs in your interfaces as that code is touched when working on other projects.

The WWW subdomains are unnecessary and should be deprecated. Join the effort to simplify!

According to their mandatory registrant rules, you could just own the .MOBI domain for your site and not publish a site on it — just sit on it, to keep others from hosting stuff on your trademarked name. Once you publish content on the .MOBI domain, at least the root response must be in XHTML-MP flavor, and they will police these domains to insure compliance. Sites not in compliance will be warned, and if they aren’t fixed, their zone file entries will be deleted until the sites are corrected!

Now, I understand that they idealistically want to make the internet world a better place, and they’re seeking to insure consistency by imposing this standard. However, I think they’re misguided and this is a pretty bad business decision. I don’t see anything wrong in having generally thematic rules associated with TLDs, like using .EDU only for educational institutions and .MIL only for military sites. My beef is with having a registry now take on additional powers of setting a required protocol for the content on the site, policing it and checking for validity, and unplugging sites that don’t comply. This is another case where corporate business gets too full of its own self-importance, and tries to get everyone to join in lockstep. I think that business can sometimes work much better with fewer restrictions — how about selling a product and then giving some leeway in how the customer decides to use it? They’re shooting themselves in their own feet with these rules.Just imagine — at the beginning of the internet, if the registry had required that website owners have 100% valid HTML, or else have their domain names unplugged? Or, when version 4 of HTML was released, if they’d then required all sites to convert from earlier HTML versions over to it, or be suspended? Such measures would’ve slowed down the growth of the internet by creating additional entry barriers.

Insisting upon a particular format for .MOBI sites is exactly the same thing. HTML and the internet have been as successful as they have because browsers have been forgiving of invalid HTML, and there hasn’t been some autocratic entity policing the internet. According to the Wikipedia article on HTML:

“Early versions of HTML were defined with looser syntactic rules which helped its adoption by those unfamiliar with web publishing. Web browsers commonly made assumptions about intent and proceeded with rendering of the page. Over time, the trend in the official standards has been to create an increasingly strict language syntax; however, browsers still continue to render pages that are far from valid HTML.”

I think that the registries should concentrate on the basic administration and handling of domain names, but should keep their noses out of what protocols are used on the domains, and whether they’re validly formed or not. For instance, if I already had my applications built in HDML or WML, why should I have to deliver any content at all in XHTML-MP? Many of the wireless devices are have legacy support. XHTML-MP, on the other hand, is not backwards compatible with legacy wireless protocols.

I think this requirement of theirs is misguided — the idea of a .MOBI TLD for wireless devices was an interesting idea, but they should have left it up to site owners how to handle content on there, just as the internet has operated thus far. Market forces are strong enough to influence how/what people deliver content on their sites!

As it stands, those of us who already have mobile applications are already able to use dynamic aplications to sense device types used to access our regular WWW.COM domains, and deliver up content in formats friendly to those devices. Why would I now want to deliver up mobile content on this new domain where I have to worry about their restrictions? After all, typing in .COM on your cellphone is one character shorter than .MOBI. Many sites already sniff the USER_ACCEPT strings which indicate the compatible protocols for devices, and then deliver up interfaces which work on mobil apps directly from their .COM domains.

So, what incentive is there for endusers to suddenly adopt typing site domain names into their devices using .MOBI?