.ASIA Opening Up To The World

The .asia top level domain is opening itself up to any person or individual anywhere in the world with changes coming to eligibility requirements. The new eligibility requirements will mean global communities doing business in Asia and Asian communities living outside the region will be able to register .asia domain names without local presence requirements and eliminating checks, simplifying the registration process.

The currents eligibility requirements require businesses and individuals to be in Asia, or to have a local presence requirement.

The proposed changes to the .Asia Charter Eligibility Requirement Policies that the registry believes will be implemented without changes will see DotAsia:

• open up registrations to global communities doing business with the region
• open up registrations to Asian communities living outside of the region
• make .ASIA TLD implementations easier for registrar channel partners located outside of Asia
• simplify the registration process for new registrants worldwide.

The changes, currently in draft form, are expected to come into place on 15 July with no changes expected.

There are currently around 215,000 .asia domains under management with over 80% (based on registrant contact) from within the region, led by China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia. Registration numbers more than doubled to around 500,000 in 2013 on the back of an aggressive promotional campaign, dropping markedly a year later and have declined gradually since to be around 15,000 above prior to the promotion.

The promotion saw a large amount of abusive or potentially abusive registrations that came through. But by closely monitoring the registrations DotAsia was able to respond to the challenges and mitigate the problems that resulted from the abusive registrations. DotAsia are proud of their record in mitigating abuse, and their anti-abuse team stepped in and suspended numerous domains that were determined to be a threat to the Internet.

While there were lessons learned, they’re still interested in future promotions either on their own or with channel partners such as registrars. But more important than large registration numbers is usage.

“Success to us is not just having 1/2 million domains under management, it’s also about real usage, and how we as a not-for-profit organisation can play a role in helping to expand the Asia Internet market,” Leona Chen-Birkner, VP Registrar Relations, DotAsia, told Domain Pulse.

To read the .ASIA Charter Eligibility Requirement Policies as proposed, see:
https://www.dot.asia/policies/DotAsia-Charter-Eligibility–CANDIDATERELEASE-v4.4-2017-05-04.pdf