Last week, ICANN ruled in favour of allowing customized top-level domains. It estimates that these new properties will cost upwards from $100,000 - thought the cost will definitely come down with time. Soon, we might be seeing things like .vancouver, .map, .food and .hiking - and the numerous sub-domains associated with these TLDs.

This decision effectively ends the debate about the usefulness of .mobi. dotMobi describes itself as “the gTLD dedicated to users who access the Internet through their mobile phones.” It’s unrealistic to expect that out of hundreds new TLDs users are supposed to only trust .mobi sites for mobile access. Every site on every top-level domain should be mobile-friendly.

I really respect the technology that the dotMobi foundation has developed - we use DeviceAtlas at Handi, for instance. I believe .mobi sites are still useful for hosting services that are purely focused at the mobile context - location-sensitive websites, for instance. However, the battle for large-scale deployment of general purpose content in that TLD seems to be over before it even began.