The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has all but quashed Bulgaria’s hopes of having a custom domain name in Cyrillic.
Bulgaria’s deputy minister for transport, information technologies and communication, Parvan Rusinov, has confirmed that ICANN has refused the country’s top level domain request because the suffix would be too similar to Brazil’s existing top level domain name, .br, reports Novinite.com.
In an online discussion with the minister, ICANN officials said: “As far as the fast track procedure is concerned, ICANN has run out of options for registering domains in the national alphabets of Bulgaria and Greece.”
However, Mr. Rusinov said: “No clear criteria and arguments have been presented so far to the Bulgarian side to justify the rejection of our proposal.”
ICANN has received 21 applications for non-Latin domain names — including requests from Russia and various states in the Middle East, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.