.asia Internet domains to be launched
Asia has finally got itself its own regional internet domain, although the creativity of the name can be questioned: ‘.asia’. The DotAsia Organisation finally received official approval for the .asia domain on October 2006 since they began work on .asia in 2000.
Don’t put on your party hats just yet, because the first few .asia domains won’t go live on the internet until March next year, so you will just have to wait a bit longer. The most interesting part about the DotAsia organisation’s registry system is that it uses an auction, unlike most other net domains. So the individual that bids the highest will earn the right to have the domain name. Indeed it’s an odd system, maybe it’s to rake more profit for DotAsia or it could be just a effective system of deciding who receives the right to own those domain names, only time will tell.
Who gets access to these sites? .Asia reaches from Australia to the Middle East, so bad luck to Europe, Africa and America. But they probably will increase its reach once .asia becomes popular, so don’t give up hope!
For those that aim to buy themselves a .asia domain: Don’t worry, the domain names will be in english alphabets, so there isn’t a need to learn new languages yet.
Eventually though domains will be offered in character sets used in Asian nations but the DotAsia Organisation has given no hint about when this will begin.
Icann (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) will be trialing ways to use local Asian languages in the domain addresses such as Korean, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Japanese, Russion, Hindi and Arabic. This will definitely give an advantage to Baidu, the Chinese Google equivalent, unless Google already have something up their sleeves which they probably do.
Source:
BBC News