The long-awaited domain in Bulgarian is already here and gives us the opportunity to register sites with the ".бг" extension. The new domain allows creating Internet addresses written in Bulgarian. All institutions, municipalities, companies and individuals who wish to be easier to detect in the Bulgarian internet space will benefit from this innovation. The new domain will facilitate Internet access for Bulgarian users, since one would not need to search for Latin equivalents to specific Bulgarian letters like Й, Ц, Ш, Щ, Ъ, ЮиЯ.

Since June 2016 users have been able to use the Cyrillic extension ".ею" With the introduction of ".ею" Cyrillic became the third official alphabet used when writing domains. The other options are Latin and Greek alphabets. In addition to ".ею" However, Bulgarians insisted on having their own domain. Spaska Tarandova - Executive Director of the Global Libraries - Bulgaria Foundation, told us more:

"For us Bulgarians it is important to be able to write the way we speak. It is important to preserve our unique letters. When you need to look for something you no longer need to replace certain sounds from our alphabet with a combination of letters and you could write freely in Bulgarian. I call on the large network of community centers that are preserving Bulgarian language, culture and spirituality to get their domains in Bulgarian."

The "Imena.bg" company was chosen by the Bulgarian state to administer the new domain in Cyrillic, which after long discussions was approved by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in October 2014. Until May 8, 2017 registrations of domains for so-called "protected" names, such as ministries and municipalities will be processed. Then the requests of other users will be processed. CEO of "Imena.bg" Hristo Slavov said that everyone could register up to 100 domains. He also said that the names of the pages must contain a minimum of 3 and maximum of 63 characters from the Bulgarian alphabet. Numbers from 0 to 9 as well as a minus sign ("-") can also be used. Here's what else Hristo Slavov told us: "The creation of the ‘.бг’ space is a great example of a successful cooperation between private business, public organizations and the state. I think that if this model continued to function well our society would have success in other areas, too. The major benefits of the new domain are obvious. One of them is communication entirely in Bulgarian, as many of our fellow citizens have started to communicate in other ways, not relying on Bulgarian. We have already received many requests, which shows that that the Bulgarian community understands the importance of this new internet space."

For each ".бг" address a double with the currently used ".bg" will also be created. "Imena.bg" warned that the registration of site names with profanity and insults is not tolerated and after verification they will be deleted.

English: Alexander Markov