In a story at SFGate, Jeff Yang has written a report on the upcoming role out of the recently approved top-level domain name .asia. The ceremony of .asia's approval by ICANN last year in Brazil was largely ignored. But Jeff points out that as the "fall launch of this new domain approaches, it raises some interesting, perhaps even historic, implications". From the article: "[.asia is the] first top-level domain to be awarded to a transnational entity without some kind of a formal government structure. The approval of .eu in 2005 was based on the fact that the European Union has a representative body, a shared currency and other things that give it real institutional status. 'Asia,' on the other hand, is far from being an institution. In fact, its current status is probably best understood as a hybrid between concept and convenience."
Read full story: SFGate
See related topics: DNS, Domain Names, Domain Registries, Multilinguism, Top-Level Domains
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The egalitarian spirit of having a TLD assigned to a geographic region such that the TLD string is not a word in the native language of any culture within the very region is admirable.
"ASIA" is equally incomprehensible as a word in Japanese as it is in Urdu.
Using English is a great way to avoid favoritism among those who do not speak it.