Industry moves to ease using Net via cellphone

Used your cellphone to browse the Internet lately?

Probably not.

But yesterday, a consortium of phone makers, service operators, and software providers took a step in their attempt to turn occasional mobile Web browsing into a habit.

Meeting in Luxembourg yesterday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers approved the creation of the ''.mobi" domain suffix, to be used exclusively for websites designed for mobile devices.

At the same time, they formed an organization to moderate the use of the domain, mTLD Top Level Domain Ltd.

The .mobi suffix is the 17th top-level domain approved by ICANN, which oversees the distribution of domain names and approves domain name suffixes for sale, according to the nonprofit group's website.

Earlier this year, ICANN approved the ''.jobs" and ''.travel" suffixes.

The first .mobi websites probably will not appear until early 2006, said Rick Fant, a board member of mTLD. That organization is now hiring a staff and finding a chief executive.

Fant said that mTLD's investors hope the .mobi suffix will encourage companies to create versions of their websites that can be viewed easily from mobile phones.

''Consumers do not know that any significant number of mobile Internet services exist for a mobile device," Fant said. ''The consumer and enterprise customer have no expectation that the Internet is ready for their device."

Fant said 12 to 14 percent of mobile phone users browse the Internet with their cellphones, but the vast majority are in Japan and South Korea. He attributed American and European reluctance to use the Internet capabilities of cellphones to the failure of websites to be cellphone-friendly.

''The devices are ready. The networks are ready. The technology exists. It just hasn't been deployed," he said.

But Roger Entner, an analyst who follows mobile phone technology for Boston-based Ovum, said the .mobi designation will become relatively useless within the next few years, as newer and faster cellphones become capable of displaying regular websites and as website programmers develop software to reformat websites for cellphone use.

''It's like going from a dial-up world to a DSL or cable modem world," he said. ''It wouldn't make sense now to approve a suffix to indicate that it's a website for dial-up.

''This would have been brilliant three years ago. Now the people who are most likely to browse the Internet with their phones are the ones getting high-speed phones."

Companies that register a .mobi domain name must conform to rules that limit the size of graphics on a site and tailor the design to fit a small screen. The website will also detect what kind of device is attempting to connect; if a PC tries to connect to a .mobi site, for example, it might be forwarded to a different website designed for computers.

Companies have long been able to create websites adapted to mobile phones, but few have taken advantage of the technology, said John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

''This is something that has been frustrating to mobile phone providers," he said. ''Unlike in other countries where the cellphone is a normal way to access the Internet, here most people buy phones to make calls."

ICANN officials were unavailable for comment.

''This will definitely have an encouraging effect for people to use their mobile devices to access the Internet," Palfrey said.

Joe Light can be reached at jlight@globe.com.