TechLaw

What do college hotties, sexy moms, and chicas desnudas have in common with attorneys and judges?

They are all among the 5,500 domains up for auction as "premium domain names" in the .mobi top-level domain space, a recently created top-level domain dedicated to mobile content. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was kind enough to permit the dotMobi consortium -- a group composed mostly of dominant telecom and high tech companies -- to reserve thousands of domain names for  itself for later "distribution using non-traditional allocation models" outside of the familiar trademark owner sunrise and first-come, first-served processes. Right now, dotMobi is selling its reserved domain names via public auction.

The first auctions took place beginning Sept. 26. According to the dotMobi Blog, the following domains were recently auctioned off: poker.mobi ($150,000), ringtones.mobi ($145,000), news.mobi ($110,000), shopping.mobi ($55,000), email.mobi ($50,000), buy.mobi ($32,500), podcast.mobi ($25,000), cash.mobi ($12,500), pda.mobi ($8,000), and zipcodes.mobi ($8,000).

Readers of this blog should be aware that attorneys.mobi, lawyer.mobi, and lawyers.mobi will be auctioned via an online auction on Oct. 31. Again, full details are available at the dotMobi registry site.

Hypocrisy Note: After years of playing Hamlet on the subject of creating a .xxx top-level domain for what  in polite company is called adult content, ICANN finally denied the sponsor's application earlier this year. But the well-heeled dotMobi consortium appears to have succeeded where poor little ICM Registry could not. Among the "premium names" that ICANN permitted dotMobi to reserve for later resale are 21 variations on "adult," 19 variations on "porn," dozens of sexual references, and all seven of comedian George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television."