You need to land users in the correct Linguistic and Cultural Web Space. You can do this with ASCII domains but it is tough. The Chinese often do it with numbers, but they attribute all sorts of meanings and nuisances to numbers.

Generally, speaking there are two reliable ways of achieving this, but each works well in some context and not so well in others.

The most established way of doing this is by using ccTLDs and this works excellently where the target language is represented in Latin characters. Some cultures, however, miss the accents especially where they are not really, accents but part of an entirely separate letter, as in Czech.

When you get away from languages that are normally written in characters, in order to make the domains intuitive, it will be necessary to represent names in character sets other than Latin. Would you intuitively type Chinese, even if you had the right equipment? So would you expect those that read and write in other scripts to intuitively input domain names in English?

The real argument boils down as to where Non Latin characters are needed, and then whether the ccTLD gives further advantages over dot com or not. I believe that if you watch current behaviour, there are many signs that should indicate which is true. The same answer may not be universally applicable, however. In some instances languages and countries almost map to one another, and in other situations they bear almost no relationship.

At the end of the day, it is about defining target markets and working out the most reliable way to direct users to the content they seek, or at least something that acts as a reasonable substitute.

Ask yourself careful, where the hell is Englishname.Asia going to take me?

***FS*** I don’t like the space.. an English extension for a foreign language continent.. buy.cn if you want asian domains