Asia’s arrived, at least on the Internet. The general scramble for Dot Asia domain names has now started, and the suffix will go live from March onwards for corporations, companies and citizens of 70 countries from Iran to Australia. It doesn’t mean much beyond expanding real estate on the Web — most coveted addresses are already taken on existing domains like .com or India’s own clunky .co.in. Besides of course, no one wants to be seen on .um (that was reserved for ‘minor outlying islands’ of the US). So every time the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers announces a new name, it’s a vast new frontier. Now the landgrabbing and profiteering can begin all over again.But names have an almost incantatory power. Imagine what it means for 60 per cent of the world’s population to share a last name on the Web. The fact that Europeans reconstituted themselves into a transnational superstate made all the difference to their weight in the world, but the idea of Asia is too diffuse to be harnessed. Unlike the sense of solidarity that Latin America and Africa evoke, what links war-scarred West Asia to the outbacks of Australia, small shiny Singapore to the elephantine girth of India? Not to mention China, which is often treated as the focal point for the entire continent in Western eyes. If the Asian hemisphere is a rising economic and geopolitical counterweight to Europe and the US, it is without any conscious intention of acting in tandem. But the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and an Asia that is conscious of its own power is bound to benefit everyone in it. Ideas of community that centre on geography and space have given way to communities of interest and affiliation, in part because of the great common platform that technology provides. It’s fitting that the Internet, which fundamentally changed the idea of collectivities, should be the first place to institute a United States of Asia. Because there may be such a thing as an Asian interest.
