[LINK] Dot Asia a good idea?

[Kim Davies]

Quoting Kim Holburn on Tuesday October 09, 2007:
| I don't know, it used to be simple and somewhat consistent.  Country  
| code TLDs were 2 letter.  What's wrong with that?  Universal or US  
| domains were three letter.  Fine but then they started adding stupid  
| domain names like info and coop.  Wasn't there a museum domain?  Was  
| it abbreviated or not?  I can never remember.

It is still more or less consistent. Two letter labels are reserved
for eligible entities as country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs), and
follows the ISO 3166-1 standard. Three or more letter domains are for
global top-level domains (gTLDs). Some of the gTLDs are generic (.COM,
.ORG etc availabkle for anyone to register), some are sponsored (.GOV is
limited to US Government, .MUSEUM is limited to museums). There are 19
gTLDs, the remainder are ccTLDs.

| eu - is that a political entity or a geographic entity?

It is a ccTLD, and therefore its eligibility is derived from its listing
in ISO 3166-1. (Actually, more specifically, it has the status of
"exceptionally reserved" which applies to three codes -- AC, EU and UK)

| If asia is going to get a TLD what exactly is asia?  Does it include  
| Pakistan?  Afghanistan?  Any other stans?  New Guinea?  Australia?   
| Russia?

I believe that its sponsorship agreement restricts eligibility to
any entity in the ICANN "Asia/Australia/Pacific" region as listed at
http://www.icann.org/montreal/geo-regions-topic.htm

| What about Africa, is Africa going to get a TLD?  The Middle East?   
| South America?  Oceania?  The pacific rim, .apec anyone?  French  
| speaking Africa?  What about continental Europe?  .NATO? .asean?

The introduction of new top-level domains in the ICANN era (i.e. since
1998) is based on bottom-up, rather than top-down, selection. That is to
say the domains you are seeing derive from proposals that were submitted
during a number of open selection rounds. The fact that there is no
.apec or .asean is rather that no eligible applications were received
for them during those opportunities.

I am not saying it is right or wrong, but it is not that someone has
thought "there should be a .asia, but no .africa".

| As for asian language character sets why would they want a european  
| language TLD for that except they have no common language?  Chinese  
| companies for instance probably want .公司 for a TLD.

Well exactly. This is why there is a desire to introduce non-Latin based
top-level domains. .测试 and .測試 amongst others will be introduced
into the DNS root zone in just a few hours as the first step toward
this.

| I'm waiting for .coca-cola and .ibm as TLDs !!!  Who are our new  
| overlords?

The policy for the selection of new gTLDs is currently under development
and could well result in policies that would allow those types of
domains. (There is more about it at
http://www.icann.org/topics/new-gtld-strategy-faq.htm)

kim