Irish domain name company buys '.mobi' suffix

(AP) -- An Irish company is buying a venture that was founded by leading technology and wireless companies and operates the ".mobi" Internet domain for mobile Web sites.

The company - Afilias - already owns ".info" and had been running ".mobi" and others under contract. Now by owning ".mobi" outright, Afilias gets an undisclosed annual fee for each of the nearly 1 million ".mobi" names registered.

Financial terms of the sale were not disclosed.

The ".mobi" suffix began operations in 2006 as a home for Web sites that are specially adapted for mobile devices and their smaller screens. The founders of the company that had owned the domain, mTLD Top-Level Domain Ltd., include Nokia Corp., Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and T-Mobile.

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