Bulgaria 'Battles' Brazil for Cyrillic BG Domain Name

An official online poll shows that "bg" and "bgr" are the most favored combinations of Cyrillic characters for a Bulgarian domain name. File photo

The characters "bg" and "bgr" are the most popular for Bulgaria's national internet address in Cyrillic, according to the results of an online poll conducted by the Ministry of Transport, Information Technologies and Communications (MTITC) in December 2009.

Parvan Rusinov, Deputy Minister, has announced the poll results on Monday. He said that the answers would need careful analysis, as the state was likely to qualify with both domain names, in case "bg" was rejected because of its visual similarity to the domain name allocated to Brazil in the Latin alphabet.

Although one condition of the poll had been that "bg" might not be approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a third of the voters had favored precisely those characters, while a quarter had chosen "bgr" as their favorite combination of letters.

Rusinov expressed his gratitude for the active interest of the participants, adding that this public consultation would help to achieve national consensus on the domain name in Cyrillic.

He also announced that MTITC had also organized a round table with the participation of organizations interested in the process - Register BG, Uninet, Public Internet Registry, and others.

A second online survey, entitled "Selection and employment of registry of the domain in Cyrillic", had shown people's attitudes about the standards to be met by the organizations that will maintain the database of new names in Cyrillic and those who will register them.

Two thirds of participants had responded that the administrator for the domain in Cyrillic should be different from the one for Latin addresses.bg.

A low price and a fast registration procedure for obtaining a domain in Cyrillic were among the most important performance criteria of a future administrator, according to the survey answers provided online.

The procedure for registering Internet addresses in alphabets other than Latin to ICANN, was officially launched on November 16, 2009. State support is a precondition for participation in this process.?

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