Back when the Web was new, and not a few large companies didn't see the benefit of investing in a site, many an enterprising individual bought up domains using trademarks of well-known brands. Some of these businesses ended up paying through the nose to get these domains back. To head off a similar situation for a new Internet address created just for mobile phones and smartphones—with .mobi, mobile devices are lead to Web sites optimized for them, just like .com leads traditional Web pages to browsers on PCs—an organization called the mobile Top Level Domain Ltd (mTLD) launched a Trademark Sunrise Registration program last month.

On June 12th, the Sunrise Registration period began for dotMobi, to encourage owners of intellectual property (IP) to lock in their trademarks as .mobi domain names before the process opened up to the general public on August 28th. The mTLD extended the deadline by almost another month to Setpember 22nd today. Average Joes don't get to register their .mobi domain names until September 26th now.

Reasons given for the extension include the interference of the summer holiday season, third-quarter budget planning, and the amount of paperwork required for IP holders to figure out exactly what domains they want to register in the first place. Domain name practice lawyer David Taylor welcomes the extra time. "It provides trademark holders with additional and much needed time to decide upon and organize their domain name applications based upon eligible trademarks," he explained.

Although mTLD announced plans to run the Trademark Sunrise Registration program earlier this year, it could also use the additional time to build awareness of .mobi, as many company's are only starting to become conscious of its existence. mTLD's VP of marketing & business development Alexa Raad told ipwalk, “We want more time to educate the business community and let them know about Dotmobi.”

“We are telling them that they should not just get a .mobi domain name to protect their trademark, but we also want to help them figure out how to introduce their brand to the mobile world, how to build a channel,” she added.

Since MTLD launched the registration program, hundreds of global brands have singed up for .mobi domains. Most accredited registrars have been in entertainment and media, followed by what the MTLD calls fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) and in technology.

Some company's have even launched .mobi mobile-device friendly sites already. These include BMW with bmw.mobi and neckermann.de go live with neckermann.mobi; both in the last couple of weeks.

Pushed by the likes of Microsoft, Nokia, Vodafone and Samsung Electronics, .mobi won approval from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in July 2005. The Finnish phone maker first proposed a domain extension for mobile devices back in 2000, but ICANN rejected it because of the lack of technical details in the application. Nokia persevered, however, garnering industry support, before re-submitting it as .mobi in March 2004.

.mobi has met with criticism, including from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the group's director and Web inventor. They would prefer to have Web sites recognize when a mobile device access them, only sending pages that are optimized for handhelds to them; basically maintaining .com for all types of Web content.

Whereas .mobi works by creating two Internets in their opinion: one for mobile devices and one for desktops.