ICANN Considered Harmful

ICANN is stupid. (Heck, the entire DNS is stupid, but that’s a rant for another time.) They’ve demonstrated their stupidity in the past by creating such widely-used and successful TLDs as .museum, .coop, .biz, and .aero. Today, working to make corporations richer (rather than make the internet better), they continue their terrible record by instituting the .mobi TLD, ostensibly for websites intended to be used by mobile devices such as cellphones and PDAs.

As Gizmodo points out, this is stupid for one major reason: while typing “com” on a cellphone keypad requires 7 keypresses, typing “mobi” requires 9, and since the whole idea behind creating the .mobi TLD is to make mobile web-surfing easier, this is already going in the wrong direction. If there absolutely must be a TLD for mobile domains, why not mbl (6 keypresses) or even mb (3)?

Furthermore, the ability to create websites designed specifically for mobile devices is already present in the W3‘s current HTML specification: site designers can use the link tag to indicate an alternate, mobile-specific version of a document, which handheld devices can then fetch and display:

<link rel="alternate" media="handheld" href="mobile.html" />

Why isn’t ICANN creating TLDs that people would actually use? Why is there no .inc, .ltd, .llc, .film, .game, .book, .blog? ICANN needs to be stopped before the DNS becomes more of a giant mess than it already is.