Tue, May 22 2012
In what is the first request of this kind within the European Union, Bulgaria requested a domain name in Cyrillic, Bulgaria's State Agency for Information Technology and Communication (SAITC) said in a statement on June 23.
In particular, Bulgaria wants to register and maintain a country code in Cyrillic, ending in ".бг".
The news comes a year after the agency forecast that Cyrillic would be put to Internet use by 2010 following a Bulgarian-Korean project, which set out a year ago.
The letter, carrying the signature of SAITC head Plamen Vachkov, was handed in to the president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Paul Twomey.
A decision to this effect is expected on June 26, when ICANN officials will be considering at a Paris-hosted conference the creation of first-level multilingual domains.
In related news, this autumn SAITC will invite to Sofia all countries using the Cyrillic alphabet, namely Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Mongolia, Russia, Serbia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine. Participants are expected to consider internet names allocation across countries using the Cyrillic alphabet.
Although a clear winner in an online poll on the Transport Ministry website, the .бг internationalised top domain name could possibly be rejected by ICANN.
Following the ICANN decision to allow top-level domains in non-Latin script, Bulgaria's Transport Ministry said it is preparing its application
A June 26 EU decision would make registering domain names in Bulgarian and Greek possible.
EU commissioner Reding calls for ICANN to become fully privatised and independent body.
Bulgarians are discriminated against and double-charged for using Cyrillic when writing SMSs, Bulgarian MEP Vigenin said.
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