[At-Large] dot-mobi policy advisory board positions

[John L]

Speaking of elections, the .MOBI domain has a policy advisory board which 
includes a seat selected each year by the ALAC, and it's time to make this 
year's selection.  I've held that seat for the two years that it has 
existed, and would like another year.

The PAB meets quarterly by phone and once a year in person.  Its task is 
to provide policy advice for the management of the .MOBI domain.  As you 
may know, .MOBI is intended for users of mobile devices, and the idea is 
that content in the .MOBI domain works on your mobile.  So far that's been 
mostly a technical goal, since the state of the mobile web is sort of like 
the PC web ten years ago, with slow connections, small screens, and 
browsers with varying and sometimes incompatible features and 
capabilities.  (There is a guy at .MOBI whose full time job is to maintain 
an encyclopedia of devices and browsers.)

This year in the PAB we've addressed a variety of issues that affect 
users.  The biggest problem is that in .MOBI there are a lot of domains 
owned by domain speculators who care little for the interests of users. 
In many cases they just leave their domains parked, which isn't great, but 
at least follows the rules, but sometimes they just point the domain at 
random parking sites that don't work on mobiles at all, due to large 
images, frames, etc.  The domain has a compliance process so they know 
which sites don't work, and I've been helping them develop a combination 
of carrots and sticks to get the sites to do something reasonable on 
mobile phones.  Farther out I'm trying to figure out ways to encourage 
domains to build useful content rather than link farms, with weather.mobi 
being a good example of a site that could have been a link farm but 
instead has useful weather forecasts.

Even farther out than that, it seems pretty likely that mobile devices 
will catch up to PCs in capability, so any site that works on a PC will 
work on a mobile.  At that point the other characteristics of mobiles 
become more important, that people tend to keep them with them much more 
than they keep their PCs with them, and that they physically move around 
so you can do stuff like have a site that uses geolocation to recommend 
restaurants near where you are right now.  It'll still be important for 
.MOBI content to be good for mobile users, although the issues will be 
quite different.

Anyway, I've enjoyed doing this with .MOBI and would like to keep at it 
for at least another year.  The .MOBI management has sent Cheryl a note 
explaining when they'd like to hear back (fairly soon).  As far as I know 
I'm the only candidate for this position this year, but the ALAC should 
set some dates so we can be sure and so if need be there can be a vote.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor
"More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.