Ministry of Transport, Information Technology and Communications

The process of submitting requests for creating Internet domain names in languages based on scripts other than Latin has begun. In connection to this, MTITC announced that the registrar of the names in Cyrillic in the Internet field for Bulgaria will be appointed by the Bulgarian government.

In this way, our country joined the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which is set to begin the process for registering Internet domain names for countries using alphabets based on scripts other than Latin.

Bulgaria was among the first countries to declare its interest to participate in the process, submitting an official letter addressed to the President of ICANN in June 2008. At that time, after a consultation with the Bulgarian Internet community, the domain name „.бг" was accepted as the national code in Cyrillic. It remains open if this will continue to be the case or if another name will be requested because of the current technical requirements that were not clear in June 2008.

The online polls, letters and discussions that some private companies and associations have organized about the choice of the registrar will not influence the decision of the government to select the best option for the Bulgarian Internet users.

The whole procedure for submitting the documents and approving the domain name from ICANN is a process which needs to be approached responsibly.

We received the following clarification from ICANN: "ICANN keeps a constant contact with MTITC which is responsible for the government policy in the field of communications. We expect their further participation in the process of including Internet domain names in Cyrillic. ICANN does not decide neither what is a country or territory (this is specified by ISO, International Organization for Standardization), nor the country codes, nor who can be a registrar or a technical contact for the existing or for the future domains of the countries. ICANN's work is transparent, following all the procedures for creating domains for the countries with non-Latin scripts and they are available to see at the organization's website. The process of including the new domains is a responsibility which begins and does not end on 16 November 2009."