Say Hello to .Tel

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The newest Tld coming to market is .tel.

Telnic Limited, the Registry Operator and Sponsoring Organization for the new sponsored top level domain .tel, today announced details for launch at the ICANN meeting in Paris.

Sunrise applications from national trademark owners will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis as of Wednesday, 3rd December 2008.

Landrush registration, open to all at premium prices, will open on 3 February 2009 and general availability from 24 March 2009. Applications in all categories will be accepted only through ICANN accredited registrars.

Launch of open registration is slated for late March 2009.

According to the registry, .tel will enables individuals and organizations to publish and control, in real time, how they can be reached. It will enable people to reach a business from any Internet enabled device (computer or mobile) simply by typing, for example, ‘AVIS.tel

To us it seems like another useless extension and cetainly seems to have to potential to confuse the general public as the what the difference between .mobi and .tel will be.

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  1. Justin Hayward says

    Thanks for covering our announcement. I can understand why at first glance you might form the opinion that you have, but there’s a fundamental difference in .tel from all other TLDs, including .mobi – .tel is about contact information, not content.

    Whereas .mobi presents web pages formatted to be easily readable on mobile devices, .tel is using the DNS to store contact details, links and keywords directly on the internet. This means that there’s no html to download and it’s very quick to access. As no web programming, site development or complex web design is needed, people who have been suspicious about having their own website before or who felt it was beyond them can no easily have a web presence.

    At the same time, it will also provide a freely accessible, global ‘live’ contacts directory, as no information is cached in old or outdated websites.

    We’ve done significant customer research over the past couple of years and we’re very happy with the understanding of .tel’s device-independent and easy-to-use nature in the minds of consumers and businesses alike.

    I’d urge your readers to look at the website themselves to take five minutes to see what .tel is about – http://www.telnic.org. They can also check out the simulator which will show how easy it will be to set up and manage a .tel for themselves.

    Thanks again for your interest.

    Justin Hayward
    Telnic

  2. Tony Lam, DMD says

    Companies already have a link on their main page to a contact info page. Do we need a whole new TLD to do what companies can already do with a “domain.com/contact” page that is linked to from their main page? Even .mobi can be eliminated with a mobile device detecting script that can redirect the user to something like domain.com/mobi or m.domain.com.

    Ten years from now, will any of these TLD’s be of any importance besides .com, .net, .org and the ccTLD’s?

    I can understand the motivation of the new TLD registry operators because each new accepted TLD is like being given your own money press. I’d do the same thing if given the chance and I’d give you a lot of passionate reasons for my new TLD too.

  4. Germ says

    “seems to have to potential to confuse the general public as the what the difference between .mobi and .tel will be”

    Yes, I agree…wait what’s .mobi for again?

    Actually, at least the .Tel approach is a novel one. I can see what they’re getting at, I’m very curious to see the implementation.

  5. Steve M says

    While there are certainly important, worthwhile differences between .tel and .mobi, Telnic will go broke (or sell off their rights) long before they’re able to:

    #1. Make a sufficient percentage of the public aware of the extension.

    #2. Make clear the distinctions between .tel, .mobi, and all the other established extension in the minds of the public.

    #3. Have an economically sufficient number of companies actually using the extension in their respective marketplaces (and no; redirecting .tel to companies’ .com addresses doesn’t count as true, actual use of .tel).

    .tel? DOA. RIP.

  6. jerzz says

    i hate the other TLDs as they are mainly scams to enrich registry operators and serve no viable purpose (biz info mobi, etc all junk)

    however, if someone can map phone # using a domain and DNS AND GET a major cell phone carrier to buy into it maybe it will have legs.

    although, there is nothing stopping anyone today from using a .COM for the same purpose.

    DNS has TXT records for this very reas0n so why do i want a .tel ? carriers just need to read the DNS records to implement what .TEL is proposing – nothing new or novel about this idea but they may be able to convince major cell phone carriers to buy into this (i.e. pay them big bucks to support .tel phone number mapping)

  7. admin says

    Justin

    How do you feel now that ICANN is talking about maybe 100+ new TLD’s about the prospects of .TEL??