Shun .Mobi for San Francisco Meeting? — Did ICANN

ICANN appears to go with rival sponsor and site for next week’s meeting.

.Mobi frequently creates and sponsors mobile meeting web sites for domain conferences. ICANN.mobi was featured as the official mobile site of the last conference in Cartagena.

But it looks like ICANN is dissing .mobi for its upcoming ICANN 40 meeting in San Francisco.

This morning ICANN tweeted a link to me.icann.org, which is hosted on ICANN’s main .org web site. It’s billed as the “Official mobile site for ICANN 40, Silicon Valley”.

And who’s sponsoring it? The “mobile experience” is sponsored by Neustar, a big rival to .mobi registry Afilias.

But wait. What happens if you go to icann.mobi? It states:

dotMobi is very happy to see mobile becoming a key part of ICANN’s web strategy, and welcomes the creation of an official mobile site for the San Francisco meeting.

So icann.mobi is the official site? ICANN is the registrant for ICANN.mobi although it appears the site is run by dotMobi.

Hmmm. We have Neustar sponsoring ICANN #40’s “mobile experience” on ICANN’s (PIR) .org domain, while dotMobi calls icann.mobi the official site.