Get ready for the next domain gold rush. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names, Numbers (ICANN) has “tentatively approved a .ASIA domain” for the Asia-Pacific community.
The new “.asia.” domain would supplement suffixes available for individual countries, such as “.cn” for China and “.jp” for Japan. ICANN earlier approved “.eu” for the European Union; registrations for that begin Wednesday.
Registrations for English-language names in “.asia” could begin six months after ICANN grants final approval. But first, ICANN and the DotAsia Organization Ltd. will have to spend weeks or months ironing out contract details. The DotAsia group, which consists of domain name operators in Asian countries, also plans to explore permitting site addressess in Asian languages.
Already I predict a lot of creative domain names like carrera.asia or phant.asia or for the squatters, there’s yahoo.asia and google.asia and my hands down favorite, friendster.asia.
Via Yahoo!Finance.