New top level web domain for Asia

Had a call from Radio Australia asking about the new top level web domain for Asia (.Aisa or "Dot Asia"). This is run by the DotAsia Organisation with the authority of ICANN. The agreement was signed December 2006. But there has been a recent flurry of publicity about it. I assume that .Asia are doing some PR. There has been some criticism of the idea. I told the radio interviewer that companies doing business from or in Asia might like to get a .Asia domain name to use alongside their country or international domain name, but that Aisa was a less distinct entity than Europe (with .EU).

There is also still some debate on how to handle 16 bit character sets for Asian languages, such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The easy way is to convert them to the existing ASCII subset used for domain names. But this is not as convenient as a native implementation.