Dot.Asia domain names!

"Asia has developed into a global force on the international commercial, political and cultural network. The .Asia domain aspires to embrace this dynamism in the Asia Century to become a nucleus, intersection and breeding ground for Internet activity and development in the region." (The DotAsia Organization)

In December of 2006, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) approved the creation of a new Top Level Generic Domain, ".Asia". DotAsia organization (www.dotasia.org) is responsible for .Asia domains.

On October 9, 2007, Sunrise Registration of the ".Asia" domain began and Sunrise 2 will start on November 13. .Asia domains will come alive and be a functional domain in March 2008.

Although the introduction of .Asia domains highlights the commercial, political and cultural features of Asia region, .Asia domain, according to ICANN's definition of the Asia/Asia-Pacific region, has no political or geographical meaning.

Also, all Middle East countries that are similar and could have a specific IDN (multilingual) domain name have been included in .Asia, too.

.Asia comes after the surge in IDN registrations in Asia, and I expected an IDN domain registry. Unfortunately, .Asia domain names are pure ASCII and an IDN domain registry for .Asia is a second thought and planned for the future.

It is not clear what companies will think of .Asia domain names. There are already lots of country code-generic domains in Asia and most companies and business units active in the region prefer to use the country code than the .Asia domain.

There are different languages and cultures in Asia and IDN domain names like .jp or .cn are stronger as people know what language and script they can expect to end up in. The potential customers of .Asia domains are Governments, trademark/servicemark holders, and some companies which have a branch for the Asia region.

The success of .Asia domains in their current form is not predictable, but if it's going to be anything like .EU or .Travel or .Jobs, then its future is not so bright! Landrush (scheduled for February 2008) is when registration of the .Asia domain is open to the public and I am sure there will be a landrush of people registering .Asia domains.

A pioneer domain program will allow people with genuinely good business plans and ideas to avoid the stress of a landrush when attempting to register a premium .Asia domain such as "book.asia", "music.asia" and similar quality names. The program allows people to submit their ideas, business plan, executive plan and marketing strategy for a specific .Asia domain. The best proposal wins the right to operate the best .Asia domains. You can read more about this program at pioneers.domains.asia!

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