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ICANN approves '.asia' as top-level domain

Businesses in the Asia-Pacific region will have the domain as an alternative to country domains such as ".jp."

Candace Lombardi
In a software-driven world, it's easy to forget about the nuts and bolts. Whether it's cars, robots, personal gadgetry or industrial machines, Candace Lombardi examines the moving parts that keep our world rotating. A journalist who divides her time between the United States and the United Kingdom, Lombardi has written about technology for the sites of The New York Times, CNET, USA Today, MSN, ZDNet, Silicon.com, and GameSpot. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET.
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Candace Lombardi

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers signed off on the .Asia Registry Agreement on Wednesday at its annual meeting in Sao Paulo, Brazil, meaning that businesses in the Asia-Pacific region will soon have the option of registering an ".asia" domain. The top-level domain will be overseen by the DotAsia Organization. The ".asia" domain will be used as a supplement to country domains like ".jp" for Japan and ".cn" for China.

ICANN is a California-based organization that keeps tabs on the technical side of the Internet, including guiding traffic to gTLDs (generic Top-Level Domains) ike ".com". Because of the way the Internet evolved, the U.S. Department of Commerce has ultimate control over ICANN, a point of contention with other countries. DotAsia, according to an ICANN statement, is the first gTLD registry to be headquartered in the Asia-Pacific region.