Today Reuters ran an interesting story entitled, “www.sex.asia likely to be Internet domain in demand,” discusses the prospect of dot asia domain business. In fact, the dot asia domain is confirmed to open for registration started on this October 9. The registration is on the basis that priority registration are limited to registered trademark owners. Apparently, no one will know which name will be the most popular dot asia extension on that day, as individuals, organizations, or the cybersquatters no longer view domain registration or domain parking as a risky business. Instead, they see it as a new opportunity that provide great return.

In the meantime, those who are interested in register the dot asia domain can go to the home page of these dot asia accredited registrars, authorized resellers and affiliates, as found on this page.

Fact tells, as shown in the above picture, and so I have to admit that this blog’s domain name was not a popular name, nor not even mentioned by more than 10 times in Twitter. tweetVOLUME, test this Twitter mashup yourself, it’s fun to know what’s on Twitter users’ minds and what they’re saying everyday.

Google China has registered 44 Google-like domain names in China so far, an act to prevent speculators to grab some other Chinese characters, but similar pronunciation to Google, such as 咕咕, 库高, 古歌, and 谷果. Meanwhile, a Chinese firm based in Beijing with the same 谷歌 name has sued Google China 谷歌信息技术（中国）有限公司, i.e. www.google.com.cn over the same name used, according to this article in China (in Mandarin), claiming that the name Google China used, i.e. 谷歌 has interrupted its daily office operations due to numerous calls received everyday for the Google search engine’s inquiry. Both companies used 谷歌 as the main name of the company.

This is a follow-up post of my second post in this blog. It look like a new top-level domain, i.e. dot asia is set to begin from this October, according to a news in Singapore. There are certain phases before the dot asia domain will be available for public registration, but the most interesting part is that the first-come, first-served domain registration model is not welcome at this time. For now, I’m concern about the respond of this new domain in Asia, as dot com domain name has became a successful practice whenever a person or an organization in registering the domain of a particular Web site. On the domain industry, if success is measured by the popularity, the early winner and the ultimate winner has been the dot com extension.

Recently, I have posted that the top-tier Japanese Baidu domain name was registered by another company in Japan, now Baidu Europe and even Korea, their targeted market were also been registered by someone else. Is this the act of cybersquatting? Though we believe the freedom of the Internet, but what’s the implications of the aforesaid conduct for the Internet and the company itself?

Source: http://baidu-europe.eu/?p=services (accessed on 6 May 2007)

Source: http://baidu.kr/ (accessed on 6 May 2007)