DotAsia Announces the launch of .Asia Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) for the Global Chinese, Japanese and Korean Internet Community

Hong Kong, 12 April, 2011 – Asia is continuing its rapid growth as the world’s most populated Internet marketplace, with an expectation to expand to more than 2 billion Internet users in 2013. Fact is, the vast majority of these users will not be navigating the Internet in English. Against this backdrop, Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) or web addresses represented in local languages, will help drive brand identity, search patterns and Internet market behaviours online and offline, not unlike the sweeping developments and value creation witnessed in the English and alphanumeric centric Internet in the late nineties and early millennia.

DotAsia Organisation announces the global launch of Chinese (Traditional and Simplified matched), Japanese and Korean IDN .Asia domains. “Multilingual web addresses are essential for the DotAsia community. The launch of IDN builds on the growing foundation of usage of .Asia domain names to support global brands as well as small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) around the world to enter the Asian Internet marketplace with a search and user friendly online identity.” said Edmon Chung, CEO of the DotAsia Organisation.

As a pioneer of IDN technologies, Chung was closely involved in the global technical standards as well as policy development processes to make IDN a reality. Including the introduction of IDN top-level-domains (TLDs) and IDN language policies that allow the matched delegation of Traditional and Simplified Chinese domain names to avoid user confusion, providing a more complete user experience for native users. IDN domains are also expected to play a very significant role to the development of the Internet. “Navigating the Internet in one’s native language will be the natural method of choice for the hundreds of millions of users coming online from China and around Asia who are not fluent in English. From search engine keywords, we can already see that most Asians search in their own native language. IDN domains will play an amplifying role in supporting increased search volume and improved search engine ranking results,” adds Chung.

‘Asia’, itself, is already a highly searched and natural type-in keyword, together with IDN, the ‘.Asia’ web extension helps to improve SEO (Search Engine Optimization) organically. The ‘.Asia’ domain provides improved relevance for a website to users searching for Asia related information by expanding the footprint of your presence online and brings you closer to customers in Asia.

Important Dates for the launch of IDN:

Building on the successful Sunrise and Landrush launch of alphanumeric ‘.Asia’ domain registrations (in 2007 and 2008), the .Asia IDN launch will adopted a similar approach to ensure an orderly introducing of IDN .Asia domains. In considering the market conditions in the Chinese, Japanese and Korean communities, a 70-day long Sunrise application period will be conducted:
• Starting: Wednesday, May 11, 2011
• Ending: Wednesday, July 20, 2011

The Sunrise phase will accommodate registrants with “prior rights” to names to register IDN domains with priority. These include Governments, Trademark Holders, Registered Businesses as well as current English alphanumeric (ASCII) domain name holders with Romanized or transliterated names.

The Landrush period is open for anyone interested. Similarly, a 70-day application period will be conducted:
• Starting: Tuesday, August 2, 2011
• Ending: Tuesday, October 11, 2011

For both Sunrise and Landrush, if only one application is received for a domain name, the domain will be allocated to the applicant. If more than one successful application is received for the same domain name, an auction will be held to resolve between the successful applicants.

Apart from the Sunrise and Landrush periods, the DotAsia Organisation will also launch an IDN Pioneer Domains Program between April and July 2011, for interested parties who may not qualify for the Sunrise requirements, for example new business ideas, celebrities and social (NGO/NPO/etc.) initiatives. Further information regarding the .Asia IDN Pioneer Domains Program will be announced separately.

For more details, please visit: http://idn.asia

About DotAsia Organisation
DotAsia Organisation is a regional not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote Internet development and adoption around Asia. DotAsia oversees the ".Asia" top-level Internet domain name, and is formed as an open membership consortium of official domain authorities around the region, including .CN (China), .JP (Japan), .KR (Korea), .IN (India), .NZ (New Zealand), .PH (Philippines), etc., and regional Internet organizations including APNIC, APNG, APCERT, PAN and APTLD. DotAsia has a core mandate towards digital inclusion, education and research and development. For more information on DotAsia please visit http://www.registry.asia/.

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This release was published on openPR.