Booming Asia is about to get a key indicator showing that it has arrived in internet terms — its own domain suffix.
Starting in October, the first net addresses ending in .asia will be assigned, DotAsia Organization Ltd. said Thursday.
The non-profit group, representing countries including China, Japan and India, will start giving names to governments and registered trademark holders in October, and follow up with companies in mid-November.
Potential registrants must be based in Asia, including Australia and New Zealand.
Asian internet users can now use a name reflecting their country of origin (like .ca identifies Canadian sites) or the widely used .com for commercial sites.
But .com is often associated with the United States, and DotAsia wants "to become a nucleus, intersection and breeding ground for internet activity and development" as the "Asia century" starts.
Asia is already the single largest region for internet traffic, the group's website said. Citing information from Alexa Web Search, it said 13.6 per cent of the traffic going to Yahoo, MSN and Google comes from Asia, compared with 12.5 per cent from the United States and 7.7 per cent from the European Union.
"Will this translate into traffic to .asia domains? Not on Day 1," DotAsia said on its website. But it added that, given the Asian population, rapid economic growth, and number of internet users (about 400 million, compared with 253 million in North America), an address in Asia will be a valuable asset.
DotAsia approvingly quotes a top German executive: “In order to stay in the game, you must be in Asia.”
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees domain names, approved the .asia name last October after beginning negotiations in late 2005.
DotAsia does not expect a big rush for the first group of governments and registered trademark holders, but it expects that will change when it begins to register companies.
It plans to treat all company applications as though they were received at the same time, and if two or more applicants want the same address, it will auction the name.
