ICANN to Negotiate With .Jobs, .Mobi Owners

Officials at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
announced the start of negotiations with two more sponsored top-level
domains (sTLD) Monday.

The two proposals, .mobi and .jobs, cater to the mobile device community and
human resources communities, respectively and brings the number of
corporate-sponsored domain extension proposals to four. In October, ICANN
entered
commercial and technical negotiations with the owners of .post and .travel.

This is the second time around for .mobi, the proposal originally forwarded
by Nokia in 2000. Then, ICANN rejected the application
because it was light on technical details and didn’t cover all the topics
required in the proposals.

For the second proposal, Vodafone and Microsoft were added as authors of the proposal. If the .mobi sTLD is accepted, the companies plan to launch a 12-company joint venture called Mobi JV to manage the registry, made up of vendors and trade associations
with an interest in the mobile industry.

The .jobs application was filed by a company called EmployMedia LLC, which
enlisted the Society for Human Resource Management and VeriSign — registry
owner for .com and .net — to create a domain extension for the human
resources side of a company’s business.

ICANN has yet to rule one way or the other on six other sTLD proposals in
this year’s crop of proposals — .asia, .cat, .mail, two .tel proposals, and
.xxx.

ICANN decided to allow new sTLDs in 2002 in order to smooth the transition
to new domain extensions outside the popular .com, .net and .org generic
TLDs (gTLDs), though the decision was
met with skepticism. Currently, there are six sTLDs approved by ICANN:
.aero, .coop, .edu, .gov, .mil and .museum.