The ICANNblog

ICANN Gives It’s Blessing For .Asia To Move Ahead

October 20th, 2006

Don’t you think it’s about time that the Internet have a domain to unify businesses and users in the Asia-Pacific region?

Why not, it’s a really big place!!

Addressing this giant opportunity is “DotAsia Organisation Ltd” http://www.dotasia.org

DotAsia is a membership-based not-for-profit corporation located in Hong Kong that was created in March of 2004 for the purpose of submitting a proposal to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to operate a new Sponsored TLD (sTLD) registry for the “.Asia” top-level domain (TLD).

The DotAsia organization is a corporation made up of different membership bodies from ICANN’s Asia / Australia / Pacific Region, including: Sponsor Members (organizations that operate ccTLD registries in the region) and Co-Sponsor Members (Internet, Information Technology, Telecommunications, non-profit, NGO or other relevant community organizations in the region). These members will make up DotAsia’s 11-person Board of Directors.

ICANN has recently approved the “.asia” domain for Internet addresses, supplementing suffixes available for individual countries, such as “.cn” for China and “.jp” for Japan. ICANN earlier approved the “.eu” suffix for the European Union, potentially a big winning sTLD.

Currently, Internet users in the Pan-Asia and Asia Pacific region only have the option of utilizing a generic TLD (gTLD) whose registrants are dominated by US and European individuals and businesses, or country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) that are intended for local use. According to VeriSign Global Registry Services, (http://www.VeriSign.com), only 11% of .com and .net (the two largest gTLDs) registrants came from Asia . However, Global Reach ( http://Global-Reach.biz) estimates that over 64% of the Internet’s populations are non-English speakers and that Asian languages alone make up 33% of the online population.

While current gTLDs tend to focus on a vertical group (e.g. commercial entities, network providers, organizations, etc.), “.Asia” is billed to embrace a new horizontal perspective. Unlike ccTLDs, which provide for a local audience, “.Asia” will allow the user to express universal membership in the entire Asian community.

Made up of groups that run domain names for China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and other countries, DotAsia with ICANN’s help, plan to explore permitting domain names in other Asian languages under “.asia” as well.

Knowing how these things go (the devil is in the details), finalizing the contract between ICANN and DotAsia could take months, and I don’t think registrations for English-language names will be expected for another year or two.

Traditionally, demand for new names like this has been low compared with old-timers like “.com,” which has about 60 million names. But we think this is all about to change as our world is now becoming so much more Flattened and Globalized.

And by the way, I also heard that DotAsia said it plans to restrict registrations to those in the Asian region, but they are including Australia. Figure that one out.

Backers of “.asia”, including me, believe that Asian businesses will welcome a separate identity, particularly as they expand beyond their own countries in this newly flattened and globalized world.

For more information about what’s going on in the ICANN community, go to http://www.ICANNwiki.com and participate.

Entry Filed under: ICANN News, ICANN Info, TLDs