Registrations in the .asia top level domain will be open to any business or individual from anywhere in the world from mid-July, as long as they have an interest in the Asian region, the DotAsia registry has announced.
The changes to the .Asia Charter Eligibility Requirement Policies will see global communities doing business in Asia and Asian communities outside the region becoming eligible to register .asia domain names as of 15 July without the current local presence requirements, eliminating checks and simplifying the registration process.
The eligibility changes are the result of a consultation DotAsia undertook in February. While the changes are still in draft form, the registry doesn’t expect any changes.
There are currently around 215,000 .asia domains under management with over 80% (based on registrant contact) within Asia. The most registrations are from 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 as renewals came up a year later and have declined gradually since to be around 15,000 above prior to the promotion.
Not unexpectedly during such an aggressive promotional campaign, there were a large number of abusive or potentially abusive registrations. However the registry was ready closely monitoring registrations and responded to the challenges, mitigating the problems that resulted. 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.
