On the face of it, having a top level domain for mobile web sites seems like “a jolly good idea.” The .mobi extension will allow users to know that when they visit a site it will be viewable on their mobile device. Pardon me for being the dissenting voice, but this is a supremely bad idea for the Internet.

Last week (May 22nd) industry members started to register the domains they wanted, and they’ll be followed by trademark holders on June 12th and the general public in late August.

The basic principle of the Internet is that it is platform agnostic. Something that runs in a browser on one computer should run on another. Device independence is always the goal and web designers have always had multiple browsers open checking their work as they went along.

And mobile devices have long sought to be able to take a ‘full’ web page and render it on the mobile device either in a nicely ‘squished’ way so all the information is present (see Opera Mini, Access NetFront’s display technology, and the proxy rendering from Reqwireless WebViewer to name three), or to work in such a way that the page is displayed as close to a desktop computer as possible (e.g. the Nokia S60 v3 Webcore-based browser).

So why is this new domain needed? With efforts to make it ‘less difficult’ for people trying to browse on mobile phones, a massive barrier marked confusion is now upon us. First of all, should I be going to www.site.mobi or www.site.com and let the phone handle the rendering? Or maybe the time honoured and traditional mobile.site form, e.g. http://mobile.company.[however it finishes]?

And let’s not forget that pretty much any company is going to feel compelled to grab their .mobi domain to protect their interests. Not to make a mobile site, but just to keep their options open. That’s a nice little earner for the registrar, but will lead to the same (if not more) headaches that the .eu domain created.

Where do you think www.polo.mobi will go? And by that I mean which company. Maybe it should go to the Volkswagen Polo page; or the Polo ‘Mint with a Hole’ page; or the latest news from the Polo Game League. And this isn’t an isolated case. Everyone is just about settled on the ubiquitous .com domains, why do we continue to need more domains when the original spec has the answer.  The http://mobile. prefix has served well in the past and continues to do so. Are we going to see .mobi as a simple redirector?

The simple fact is that .mobi is here, and while the grass roots may have shouted against it, the sponsors of the mark (which include Nokia, Microsoft and Vodafone) have had their way, and everyone is going to have to live with the consequences. Far from making the mobile web easier to understand, .mobi is going to be a prime cause of confusion over the next few months and years.

(oh and it’s quicker to type .com than .mobi)