Originally Posted by DomainTops Blog

ICANN is on its way to rolling out the new .asia TLD, which when released, is theoretically supposed to unite many Asian countries and offer them a sense of separate identity from the American-dominated .com world.

Over 260 TLDs already exist (that’s a lot!), most of them being country codes (CCTLDs) such as .jp for Japan and .ca for Canada, but new ones include .cat for the Catalan language and .mobi for mobile services (PDAs, Palm Pilots, Cell Phones, etc). DotAsia, the manager of this upcoming TLD, says access to registration will be restricted to Asian countries only, to offer people in Asia and business as well a chance to unite as they expand out of their country and to stay connected through one TLD.

Good news to Australian folk! Australia is in the “Asian” region considered eligible for .asia registrations when they are released.

The domain will not be open for sunrise (TM holders, primarily) for many months yet; perhaps a year - so don’t hurry to get names reserved yet.

We’ll consider adding .asia domains for their release, but before we can make it an available extension with domain appraisals, a market value must be considered first. Registration fees, demand, popularity, and age of TLD are all contributors, among others, to adjusting the value for a certain domain suffix.

In other news, we’ll be adding a .mobi extension to the list to our service within the next couple weeks.