Websites designed specifically for mobile phones will have their own domain suffix, .mobi, which the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has licensed to holding company mTLD Top Level Domain, vnunet reports. The group must now build the infrastructure to manage the new domain for the next 10 years. ICANN announced its decision at a Luxemburg meeting on Monday.

The URLs for mobiles will be assigned by next summer, and owners of registered brands will have 90 days - a so-called "sunrise period" - to register their claims to corresponding .mobi addresses. Generic names like travel.mobi and restaurant.mobi will be auctioned off to the highest bidders.

Companies that buy a .mobi address must adhere to a style guide, to ensure that the site can be viewed on a phone, writes the Guardian.

The new domain name was requested by a group of powerful mobile phone operators and handset makers, which set up mTLD Top Level Domain, a consortium consisting of Hutchison 3, the GSM Association, Ericsson, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Syniverse Technologies, TIM, Telefonica Moviles, T-Mobile and Vodafone.

Another new top level domain name, .eu for European websites, will become operational this year, reports Reuters.

ICANN agreed to set up the .xxx Internet domain for porn sites in June, after years of lobbying from interest groups.