Mike Berkens, owner of one of the most valuable private domain portfolios, touched on it in my interview with him, but he expounds on what he believes is the biggest threat to the domain industry on TheDomains.com blog. Mike feels that as an industry, we need to police ourselves or a governmental agency will step in and potentially impact more than just the trademark domain issue.

Here are a few suggestions that Mike makes in his post regarding what we can do:

1. Do NOT register, backorder, or participate in any auction containing these types of domains.
2. The drop services have to stop taking backorders for these obvious trademark infringing names.
3. Stop domain tasting.
4. Join the Internet Commerce Association (ICA)

Check out TheDomains.com to read more about this important subject.

My friend from Fox Interactive writes…

“A topic that I would be interested to understand better is .mobi. I see that you mentioned it the other day — but what is the situation with buying these urls? How many people actually know to type in .mobi? Or if you are on a mobile, when you type in a .com are you typically redirected to one? Will those domains eventually become obsolete because the technology in iPhones and such?”

I am going to be out of pocket all day today, but I know there are many people out there with greater knowledge of the .mobi extension. I am going to give my very brief overview of .mobi below, but I am opening this up for others to answer the question above in the comment section. I will approve any respectful comment if you can keep your response to 3 paragraphs or less.

My opinion about .mobi is that it is purely a marketing play. Once consumers know about .mobi, they will know any domain name with the .mobi extension is pre-optimized for mobile phone usage. If companies use and promote their domain name with the .mobi extension, consumers will become accustomed to using .mobi on their mobile devices, and they will know what .mobi means.

Because it was recently introduced, most companies companies have not used .mobi, and most consumers don’t know what .mobi is or does. Many brands who own .mobi names registered them for protective purposes, just as they try to register every other foreign extension. If and when more brands develop their .mobi names, consumers will learn about the extension, and for people who own them, the value will presumably increase. Most of the big purchases seem to be based on speculation that the value will increase rather than companies buying them to develop into mobile websites.