Telepocalypse

Open network, closed identities

Caught in my inbox today was this snippet from Wireless Week:

Wireless Seeking Own Internet Name Structure

Mobile Internet sites of the future likely will have their own domain names, much like the .com and .net names everyone is used to for the wired Internet. […] What the naming structure will be hasn’t been decided, but it falls under the general heading of a “mobile Top Level Domain” and could turn out to be “.mobile” or something else. […] The initial investors in the effort include three carriers — 3, Orange and Vodafone, plus the GSM Association, HP, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung Electronics and Sun Microsystems.

This could be a very sneaky way to bypass the open infrastructure of the Internet. What if the network were open and end-to-end, but the resources on it are only locatable once you’ve paid your fiduciary tributes to the mobile operators? What if different naming sub-domains were allocated to specific services, and you could price discriminate that way?

Very, very, evil. I’m impressed.