.Tel approved

.Tel sponsor Telnic states ICANN has approved the fresh TLD.

On the surface this is one of the worst fresh domain names to be approved — let alone suggested. As I wrote last month:

This idea makes sense for one group only: the registry that will make money selling the domains (oh yeah, and the registars getting in on the action). Why would we want something like .tel? You can do the same thing with .name or .com. The .tel extension doesn’t even enable the goal of the domain — to make it easy to find people’s contact information.

There are plenty of services that allow people to keep their contact info updated. The people that would get a .tel domain are the same ones that use other services to allow people to contact them.

In the 2006 Reglike Survey I found that most domainers don’t want fresh domains introduced.

There is one domain on the horizon that makes sense: .mobi. I’ll give my reasons in a later post…