BBC NEWS
Internet names for Asia launched
* The .asia regional internet domain has officially opened for business,
with big firms expected to grab addresses. *

Governments and companies can now register interest in specific domain
names, such as www.namehere.asia.

Companies will be able to register domains for which they own a
trademark and governments will get a chance to earmark those on a
reserved list.

The general public will get a chance to snap up their own .asia domain
when the landrush starts in February 2008.

* Wide reach *

Work to create the .asia domain began in 2000. The DotAsia Organisation
won official approval to set up the domain in mid-October 2006 and the
first .asia domains should go live on the internet in March 2008.

Unlike other administrators of net domains, the DotAsia Registry plans
to use an auction to determine who gets domains wanted by more than one
organisation. The highest bidder will win the right to the contested name.

The geographical reach of the .asia domain extends from Australia to the
Middle East. In all, 20 organisations that run country code domains have
signed up to back the .asia registry.

The .asia domain is the second regional domain to go live following the
European .eu suffix which started selling in April 2006. Other regional
domains for Africa and Latin America are expected to follow.

Lesley Cowley, chief executive of .uk registry Nominet, said regional
domains could prove to be a good option because many nations imposed
stringent conditions on anyone wanting to register and use country code
addresses.

Ms Cowley expected many of the initial requests for .asia domains to
come from companies that need to defend the trademarks they own in the
region.

"There is going to be an ever-increasing number of suffixes," she said.
"Companies need to decide whether they are going to protect their
registered marks in each and every one."

Despite the diversity of languages spoken in Asia, all the domains
offered initially will be written using the Latin alphabet which is
already used in established generic domains such as .com and country
codes such as .uk.

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.

At the same time that the sunrise period for .asia begins, net address
overseer Icann (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)
is starting trials of a system that will let net addresses be written in
local alphabets.

Icann will trial addresses written in Arabic, Persian, simplified
Chinese, traditional Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Hebrew,
Japanese and Tamil.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/7033924.stm

Published: 2007/10/09 00:27:32 GMT

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