insight 

We’re watching the launch of .asia with interest. Yesterday saw the opening of the sunrise period during which organisations with Trademarks can register domain names. If there are multiple registrations for the same domain, then instead of the usual first come first served process as observed with the launch of .eu there’ll be an auction this time.

Virtual landgrab

We expect to see the usual virtual landgrab that occurs with such launches, as brand owners seek to protect their brands, speculators seek to build portfolios of valuable domains and individuals and businesses who have missed the opportunity to register the domain name they desire in some other TLD seek to register the domain of their choice. However, it’s how the market develops in the future that is really interesting. For instance, there’s been significant sustained growth in .cn - will .asia follow suit? In the end you know a new TLD is beginning to make an impact when you start to see advertisements on buses promoting a product or service with a domain name using that TLD.

Increasing numbers of TLDs

In the longer term, when it comes to brand protection, it’s worth considering that, as ICANN is changing its processes it is likely that there will be a larger number of Top-Level Domains (TLDs). This may mean that from a brand protection perspective where businesses would previously automatically register their business name with every new TLD to protect themselves they may deem that there are simply too many TLDs to be a member of each one.”

Coping with it all

Launching a new registry today is not a simple process, as can be seen by the rules and processes as defined for .asia. Over and above that the .Asia registry will have to be sure that not only do they have the infrastructure to cope with the large volume of customer and service demands but also the massive amount of automated requests for information, for example we receive on average over a million requests an hour for its Domain Availability Checker (DAC) and approaching a million requests a day for our Whois service, which finds information about domain names ending in .uk. Any new registry will need to ensure they have the systems to meet this type of capability.