A digital land rush beckons in Asia. Nearly a decade since the dot-com boom sparked demand for unique identities and trademarks to locate websites, authorities have instituted a new top-level domain (TLD) - .asia - to drive the creation and marketing of fresh tracts of cyber real estate in the region.
Hong Kong-based DotAsia Organisation - a non-profit firm appointed to operate the .asia TLD name registry - is beginning a campaign to generate interest in the domain extension this month. Its authority to run the registry was delegated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which oversees the assignment of domain names and internet protocol (IP) addresses worldwide.
'We're adopting a comprehensive set of policies to protect the rights of individuals and organisations, ensuring the stable and orderly introduction of the .asia extension into the social and technical fabric of the internet,' says Edmon Chung Wang-on, chief executive at DotAsia. 'This is a golden opportunity to acquire prime cyber real estate in Asia and get on the fast track in attracting the world's largest and fastest-growing market.'
A domain name identifies one or more IP addresses. Each domain name includes a suffix of the TLD that it belongs to. The number of so-called generic TLDs is limited and these include .com (for commercial enterprises), .edu (educational institutions), .gov (government agencies), .eu (for all entities based in the European Union) and .org (organisations, mostly non-profit). A country code TLD, such as .hk and .cn, is reserved to denote location.
According to VeriSign, the global registry operator for .com and .net domain names, there were 128 million domain names registered worldwide across all TLDs as of the first quarter this year. It estimates an average 10.1 million new domain names were registered each quarter last year, compared with an average of 8.7 million each quarter in 2005.
Says Chung: 'Discussions about using .asia started in 2000. We made our application in March 2004 and went through a long period of clarification before we received the approval in December 2005 and signed a contract with Icann last year.'