Seriously, this is incredibly huge. Aside from being one of the single biggest changes to domain names since the “creation” of the Internet, more than 40 years ago, it also finally takes into consideration that more than half the Internet’s users’ native languages contain non-Latin characters. In a sense, it truly represents the liberty of the Internet.

It’s taken many years to get here, but if plans are approved as expected, on October 30, then applications for these new domains can start flying in as soon as November 16. I’m definitely crossing my fingers and hoping that there aren’t any let-downs, because, as Brian remarked (tongue-firmly-in-cheek, I’m sure), this proposal shows that the white man doesn’t own the Internet anymore. [BBC]

Sure, the island nation is slowly falling underwater, but all hope may not be lost yet. Valleywag points us to a USA Today article from 2004, which says there are exceptons—.su domains from the old Soviet Union are still active. But DomainNameWire refutes this, mentioning that factoid came from a VeriSign, a company that handles all domain transactions for Tuvalu, and their reasoning might be skewed. They instead reference an ICANN rule which states that domain names from any defunct country must be phased out.

So who knows what will actually happen when Tuvalu decides to swim with the fishes. But seeing that .tv domains have big time marketing appeal, I’d have trouble believing they’d just nix the domains. Still, I’m no internet domain lawyer—domain squatters, you might want to heed this warning: BEWARE OF SINKING ISLAND. [Wreck and Salvage via Eddie Codel via Boing Boing and DomainNameWire]

Also under Google’s (probably sore) thumb: googleporn, porngoogle, googlerotic, google-yahoo-sex, google-yahoo-porn, sexogoogle and to top it all off, sexpornotits. (The WHOIS doesn’t match up for that last one, but it’s definitely on Pingdom’s list.) There’s like a bajillion more, if you wanna rifle through the whole thing at TechCrunch, but most them are boring permutations of Google and Google services (gooooooooooooooooooogle) to combat cybersquatters. Not so sure about that sexpornotits one, though. [TechCrunch]

“It’s crazy. It’s just crazy,” was all Clark, who used to run a consultancy, could say after the online auction finished at a total price of US$2.6 million. Originally bought in the hope of attracting a pizza parlor to his consulting firm, pizza.com opened the bidding at $100, before reaching its final price a week later.

Clark, who expects to cash in in a few days time, only has one regret—that he didn’t buy more domain names when he could. [BBC Online]

There have been about 500,000 domain registration requests in total in the first three weeks of the .asia domain name space becoming available. Half of those happened on the first day.

If you’re interested in getting hold of a .asia domain, whether for a sex site or something less sinister, the Landrush period is set to run for another 12 days. During this period, contested domains will be auctioned to the highest bidder. After that, domain names will be sold on a first-come, first-serve basis. [iTWire]