James Seng, my good colleague in APEET,  said:

...Chiao called .ASIA “more or less like a joint venture among APxx organizations”. I say nonsense!

When I say more or less, I mean more or less... On this .ASIA entry, I’ve intended to use the language carefully at this moment ‘cos I know someone will be watching…

At the ICANN board meeting held in Mar del Plata on Fri (Apr 8), the ICANN board Chairman Dr. Vint Cerf said the followings publicly on stage:

“Vint Cerf: Oh, that feels good. Okay. Back to work.

All right. The next item is really just an update for everyone with regard to the other top-level domain—new sTLDs that are under consideration.

I want to formally say for the record that there are additional sTLDs under consideration; in particular, .asia, .mail, and .tel, and there are two of those, and .xxx.

Of those, we have had fairly extensive discussion about .asia and .xxx. We continue to evaluate those. The others will be attended to as we can get to them. But I want to say for the record that we will attempt within the next 30 days to come to a conclusion one way or the other about .asia and .xxx so these will be on a board call sometime within that period.

So for the parties who are awaiting the outcome, I want them to have some sense of assurance that we will address this matter in an expeditious way.”

OK, back to the argument. One thing I have to agree with James (if I understand him correctly) is that up to this moment I still don’t think .ASIA is completely, 100% nature joint venture among Asia Pacific (AP) organizations. It’s more or less a joint venture among APNIC, APNG, APTLD, many AP-ccTLD registries, individual experts, etc, who show their support through LOI/LOS documents. I don’t know if there’s better way to do this.

I also don’t think other sTLDs in ICANN’s bag are 100% sTLD. I don’t expect ALL APxx organizations will begin working together under the .ASIA umbrella, as I don’t expect all mobile vendors or carriers would work together for .mobi and all travel agents in the world will agree to use .travel.

Che-Hoo showed his talent to hook up those circles. He did manage to do it and the stakeholders agree to it. It’s a distributed region, for thousands of years, and people in this region still don’t know well about each other. So I said in my post at the end…it’s a tough challenge, one step at a time.

It is not “IS”. It is not “NOT”. It is more or less. If you’re a Chinese and you’d know the art of this type of language.

Notes:
- ‘more or less’ in Chinese is “多多少少” (duo duo shao shao).
- Apology for my English, since I was not fully educated in the ASCII.something environment.