The inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, has argued strongly against the creation of more top-level domains, saying they tend to partition the web into bits and undercut its universality.
In a white paper, Berners-Lee pointed out that the cost of having a brand on the web had already been increased by the fact that a person who once had merely to own the domain mybrandbname.com now also needed to own mybrandname.net and mybrandname.org to prevent others cashing in on the brand name.
"The chief effect of the introduction of the .biz and .info domains appears to have been a cash influx for the domain name registries. Example Inc.... owns example.com, org and .net. Does it also have to buy .biz, .info, and .name to avoid confusion and the misappropriation of my name by others?" he asked.
Berners-Lee said that introducing new top-level domains had two effects: one was reducing the value of one's original registration while at the same time the cost of protecting a brand went up.
And secondly, "the value of each domain name such as example.com also drops because of brand dilution and public confusion. Even though most people largely ignore the last segment of the name, when it is actually used to distinguish between different owners, this increases the mental effort required to remember which company has which top level domain. This makes the whole name space less usable," he said, asking, "is it fair to reduce the value of these domains which have been acquired at great cost by their owners?"
Berners-Lee pointed to specific problems with the proposal for a .mobi top-level domain which had cited the target community as being individual and business consumers of mobile devices,services and applications; mobile content and service providers; mobile operators; mobile device manufacturers and vendors and IT technology and software vendors who serve the mobile community.
" It sounds as though there is a use for '.mobi' when the provider of a service intends it to be for the benefit of mobile users. There appears to be a desire to limit the use of ".mobi" to companies - perhaps those in the group," he said.
"This domain will have a drastically detrimental effect on the web. By partitioning the HTTP information space into parts designed for access from mobile access and parts designed (presumably) not for such access, an essential property of the web is destroyed."
He said dividing the web into information destined for different devices, or different classes of user, or different classes of information, "breaks the web in a fundamental way" and urged the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers not to create top-level domains which did so.