After .in domains its time to conquer .asia

By Gautam Bhatia • October 9, 2007

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After .in crossing 2 lakhs and & .mobi doing pretty well for the time it has been around, Asia will be getting its own domain name. All the big buyers (cyber squatters) need not get too excited into buying domain names of big companies as The first “sunrise” period, which begins on the 9th of October, enables registered trademark holders and government bodies to register their interest in a certain .Asia domain name.
The second set of sunrise periods, aimed at other registered names, such as company names, begins on November 13th and closes on January 15th.

The “landrush” period (to be confirmed) begins in February 2008, and is aimed at allowing the general public to register their interest before the “live registration” period in March.
If there is more than 1 booking for the same domain, the domain will get auctioned. So companies having similar names may have to face this problem. For eg Mitsubishi it is one of the most common company names in Japan or the name ‘Bharat’ for India.
So this is the time for companies to start buying their domain names, or they can buy later at 15-20times the cost.
Dotasia the administrators of the domain name believe that this will be one of the highest sold domains in the world as the largest online population in the world comes from Asia.

Priced at $100, the .asia domain names will carry a registration fee of Rs 1,600 for two years fee and are expecting 30,000 .asia domains to be registered by February, 2008.

according to economic times Bharti Airtel, Reliance ADAG, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra, T-series and several other companies have already expressed interest in buying .asia domain names.
Not only will Asian companies will be interested, even international companies will show tremendous response to this domain as most MNC’s do have or are soon to have their franchises, distributors, depts etc in Asia.
The downside can be that most companies are happy with the country specific domain names (e.g. .in domain). All in all I feel at this point any new domain name that becomes available will get good response from any part of the globe.

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