ICANN Approves Tel - TLD Domain

[Brett_Tabke]

[techworld.com...]

[The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved a new top-level domain suffixed ".tel," awarding a contract to British company, Telnic. ICANN's board made the decision last Tuesday, said Andrew Robertson, a spokesman for the organisation but it was overshadowed by ICANN's rejection at the same meeting of the .xxx domain name.

Telnic, which applied for the domain in October 2000, says it envisages creating a universal text and navigation system for contact information over the Internet. Mobile device users could communicate and access the services of organisations or individuals with .tel domain names.

[edited by: engine at 7:54 pm (utc) on May 15, 2006]

[Receptional]

How did that get missed at the ICann meeting! For me, a .tel would be more useful than a .xxx.

I want one.tel :)
or in.tel

I'll even pay a fiver.

[jtara]

It would seem "obvious" that this would be intended to give telephone numbers domain names. One would hope, then, that numbers would be reserved to the carriers that control them.

They don't seem to be pushing this usage, though. Instead they are touting this as a way for companies to publish contact information or provide a single point of contact using a domain name.

The whole concept is a bit fuzzy to me. How is this different from a .com? What advantage is there to yet another TLD in this case?

It appears there is ALREADY a means for creating domain names for telephone numbers, BTW - e164.arpa. How this works or how widely it's been implemented, I dunno.

In both cases, they seem to use some newfangled DNS records that are not understood by most present-day resolvers or web browsers. The company's web site mentions that a browser plugin will be needed.

They have a lot of work ahead of them to de-muddy the intended use, make a sensible case for it, and convince companies to support the new DNS records.

[workingNOMAD]

I'd make a bet that these 68 go pretty quickly...

Bechtel
IntelItel
achtel
arratel
artelastel
barbastel
batel
battel
berstel
betel
boatel
boltel
botel
boultel
boutel
bowtel
brocatel
brotel
canistel
cantel
cartel
casquetel
catel
cautel
chattel
chaumontel
coutel
cuartel
curatel
dentel
dottel
hatel
homoeotel
hostel
hotel
htel
intel
itel
kartel
kittel
lintel
listel
mantel
martel
metel
moschatel
motel
muscatel
overmantel
pastel
patel
pightel
pimentel
pointel
postel
puntel
ratel
rattel
rostel
scutel
sheitel
shtetel
teltetel
viertel
wastel

[TravelSite]

From telnics website it sounds as though users will enter a .tel domain - e.g. ABC.tel - on your pc, tablet, mobile phone (or whatever) and up will pop different ways for you to get in touch with that particular company or individual.

For example options could include being transferred to speak directly to someone using VoIP, emailing them, phoning them in the normal way, perhaps even having the option of going through to their website.

It also looks like different types of devices may present the options in different ways / be set to gather different information by default - e.g. perhaps a cars gps system would automatically get a companies address when you tell it a name of a company/individual.

But I'm only guessing - it I don't think its very clear from their website how it will work in practice.

[wmuser]

ICANN has released more than 10 new TLDs in last 3 years but its still arguable if its a good idea as there was no high demand for any of then so .com is still the king,maybe teh situation will change in future

[Martin40]

Didn't ICANN approve .mobi recently? Isn't that TLD topically identical to .tel or am I missing something?

[g1smd]

I thought that .mobi is for sites that have content optimised for mobile phone users.

[Martin40]

Telnic offered an example of how the new domain could aid someone trying to reach the Hertz car rental service. A user would type Hertz.tel on their mobile phone and be connected to a customer service representative for the local area.

That's cool, actually.

The key differentiator for the dotmobi domain is the mobile user experience. This is driven by the Switch On! Guides. The guides contain a mixture of mandatory and recommended best practices for developing mobile content and services.

The more TLDs, the merrier...but a .shop would have been the people's choice.

[swa66]

It's a shame ICANN goes for these. Pure commercialism from ICANN, as all those having a trademark will again need to buy some domainnames. [BTW ICANN does get (a little) money for each domainname in a TLD].

There's plenty of TLDs out there. Let's boycot these new ones.

[wmuser]

Yep that can be another goal of ICANN which by far not a perfect organization