Three days after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) posted its proposed sponsored top level domains (sTLDs), Microsoft's (Quote, Chart) director of technology made the case for a mobile TLD separate from .com and .net.

Just shy of midnight Friday evening, Pacific Standard Time, ICANN -- managers of the U.S. root server housing the most popular domain names in the world (.com, .net, .org, to name a few) -- posted 10 applicants for consideration as sTLDs, including .asia, .cat, .jobs, .mail, .mobi, .post, .travel, .xxx and two competing .tel domains

Unlike domains such as .com or .net, the ICANN's new crop of domains would be dictated by the company acting as a registry (or manager) for the domain. Currently, there are three approved sTLDs -- .aero, .coop and .museum, approved in 2000.

One of the domains up for consideration, .mobi, is fielded by an industry consortium of companies with ties to the wireless and mobile world. Led by Nokia (Quote, Chart), VodaFone and Microsoft, the 10-member coalition is looking for a domain extension catering to mobile devices and the unique problems the medium provides.

Mike Wehrs, Microsoft's director of technology and standards, told internetnews.com a mobile domain will address the role mobile devices will play on the Internet in coming years.

Today, mobile devices merely access the Internet; tomorrow, they're going to be devices that act as Web servers and other repositories of Internet documents, he said. The way the domain name server (DNS) (define) architecture works for domains like .com and .net are particularly unsuited for mobile devices, he said, since it takes up to 48 hours for IP address changes to propagate on the Internet.

"Within the (.mobi) domain, because we know that mobile devices are going to be changing their IP address on a very regular basis -- every time you turn them off, go through a tunnel or lose connectivity for one or two minutes -- you need almost real-time updates of IP addresses, and that's just something that current domains don't account for, because they've never had to deal with devices that move at that rate," he said.

Not everyone agrees with that assessment, however, and thinks the .mobi TLD won't pass muster through ICANN's application process. Tom Barrett is founder of the PW Registry Corp., a registry for the country code TLD (ccTLD) .pw, an island nation in the North Pacific Ocean. Barrett is marketing the domain as the central repository for social networking, and was approved by ICANN earlier this year.

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