Recent Posts
- Facebook gunning for Web.com in latest $27 million-plus cybersquatting lawsuit
- Verisign says it needs .web because .com is running out of names
- Anger as Nominet rejects coup’s pick for chair
- Ahead of GoDaddy acquisition, MMX to scrap premium fees on 725,000 domains
- ICANN threatens to seize gTLD after Whois downtime
- China could block GoDaddy’s $120 million MMX swoop
- .CLUB CEO on selling to GoDaddy, Clubhouse, and .club’s “twerking moment”
- GoDaddy buys 30 new gTLDs for over $120 million
- Nominet members wail as ousted director made CEO
- XYZ adds .tickets to its gTLD stable
- EFF rages as Ethos closes Donuts buy
- Outrage at ICANN’s new “clown shoes” social distancing mandate
- ICANN refuses to say why it allowed Donuts to buy Afilias
- ShortDot bought another gTLD. Guess what .sbs stands for now?
- As Net4 goes dark, NIXI says customers won’t lose their expired domains
- .sucks mystery deepens. Who the hell is Pat Honeysalt?
- Universal Acceptance – making the internet work for everyone [Guest Post]
- ICANN rules out vaccine passports, kinda, but warns in-person meetings may be a long way off
- Motion to fire five Nominet directors passes in tight vote
- Nominet boss jumps before he is pushed
- Watch: the exact moment Nominet’s CEO sealed his fate
- Stick a fork in Nominet’s leadership. Tucows votes to fire half the board
- IP lobby demands halt to Whois reform
- Donuts adds another TLD to its stable as Richemont finally bows out of new gTLD program
- NamesCon Europe cancelled — “pandemics suck”
- As .gov changes hands, would Verisign run it for free?
- Nominet warns of government takeover as Namecheap backs fire-the-directors campaign
- ICANN 71 is online-only, because of course it is
- Correction: UNR’s trademark block service
- ICANN 70 has virtual schwag, other new stuff
- Everything.sucks, in losing UDRPs, puts the lie to the .sucks business model
- Domain industry shrank in Q4, but as usual there’s a big BUT
- Pirate Bay founder says ICANN won’t let him be a registrar
- ICANN finally cans Net 4 India
- Got beef with ICANN? Why you may not want to use the Ombudsman
- EU cancels .eu tender after Brexit cock-up
- More acquisitions? GoDaddy to raise $800 million
- Facebook lawsuit brings one country’s domain to a screeching halt
- CentralNic buys German monetization firm for up to $13 million
- .hotel battle lands ICANN in court over accountability dodges
- ICANN purges another dormant dot-brand
- Conspiracy nut ordered to pay thousands to “kingpins” as “cartel” lawsuit chucked out
- Three ICANN directors voted against Marby’s pay rise
- Former ICANN vice-chair Disspain joins Donuts
- Donuts acquires four more gTLDs, but allows one to be scrapped
- Rival wants the truth about the Afilias-Donuts deal amid “collusion” claims
- Coronavirus has made ICANN $11 million richer than predicted so far this year
- Lockdown bump sees GoDaddy double customer gains in 2020
- Brit .eu owners get another three-month stay of execution
- Verisign upgrades its cash-printing machine but warns post-pandemic “could go either way”
- Nominet declares member coup “invalid”
- Public comments open on new Whois policies
- ICANN CEO gets 5% pay rise
- Security firm sues Facebook to overturn UDRP loss of “good faith” typo domains
- Registrar giant created as Web.com merged with Endurance
- Nominet chair eats humble pie to stave off mass board cull
- ShortDot adds fourth gTLD to its stable, plans March launch
- Nominet boss has epiphany and calls for calm as his job hangs by a thread
- One year on, Namecheap still fighting aborted .org takeover and may target GoDaddy and Donuts next
- Defensive windfall on the cards for .spa? It’s not just for spas any more
- Two more dot-brands take the easy way out
- RobinHood.club showered with five-star reviews after .com confusion
- EURid reports 3% growth in final quarter before Brexit crunch
- Webcentral to change its branding yet again after tricky takeover
- Fire the board! Registrars attempt a coup at Nominet
- .club back over a million names as Clubhouse drives growth
- Eight years after asking, Israel to get its Hebrew ccTLD
- Time is running out for Net4 as ICANN questions Indian court ruling
- UNR getting out of the registry business with $17 million no-reserve auctions on 23 new gTLDs
- Amid .club boom, one AV vendor is blocking the whole damn TLD
- New rules could stop registries ripping off big brands
- MMX vows to refocus under new boss after crappy 2020
- Failed .org buyer Ethos Capital buys Donuts
- Crackdown looms for new gTLD auction gaming
- Would-be new country wants to share another country’s ccTLD
- 153 registrars fingered for ICANN security probe
- ICANN axes Cancun again. Apparently there’s a pandemic
- Gun nut site crashes at Epik after GoDaddy shoots it down
- It’s pandemic continuity versus gender diversity in ICANN’s board wish-list
- Free domains for .in registrants
- Here’s why two ICANN directors opposed extending Marby’s CEO contract
- Rules for the next new gTLD round near the final straight
- Island demands return of its “naked” ccTLD
- Donuts punter welcomes our new alien overlords in December premium sale
- Net 4 India gets unwelcome Christmas gift from ICANN
- Fuji Xerox kills off gTLD after rebrand
- EURid suspends 80,000 domains as Brexit transition ends
- GoDaddy’s female geeks make a bit more than men
- Donuts acquisition of Afilias closes, integration work begins
- GoDaddy pranks employees with “insensitive” phishing test
- US sneaks public Whois demands into pandemic relief bill
- Verisign drops half a mill on pandemic relief
- Mixed messages from ICANN on pandemic travel in 2021
- ICANN predicts rosy post-pandemic domain industry — time to start panicking?
- DI World Global International Headquarters is relocating
- ICANN throws the book at Net4 over dodgy transfer claims
- Fraud checks coming to .ch as SWITCH renews contract
- South African registry to be merged with film censor, broadband regulator
- There’s one obvious pick for next year’s ICANN Community Excellence Award
- ICANN could block Donuts from buying Afilias
- Westerdal offloads two more gTLDs to Donuts
- Whois privacy group finds its new chair
- Three more new gTLDs blink out of existence
- NamesCon Europe founder Dietmar Stefitz reportedly dies
- Credit union gTLD changes hands to perhaps surprising buyer
- After 20 years, DomainTools takes its first VC dough
- Gay charities get first taste of domain cash
- CIRA hits major .ca milestone on 20th anniversary
- .org made $97 million last year
- XYZ launches its beauty-themed gTLDs with slashed prices
- “Criminal” domain suspensions drop again in .uk but thousands of pandemic domains frozen
- NameSilo in profit as sales rise 11%
- CentralNic more than doubles revenue as parking business thrives
- WIPO handles 50,000th UDRP case as coronavirus drives complaints
- Brits get small reprieve in Brexit domain crackdown
- Vaccine agency to get more domain takedown powers next year
- Domain growth dropped off in Q3, says Verisign
- Donuts boss discusses shock Afilias deal
- GoDaddy has a secret weapon in its push into corporate domains
- Donuts acquires Afilias to create registry giant
- ICANN finally addresses Net 4 India meltdown, but mysteries remain
- Masochistic mug urgently wanted for thankless, pay-free ICANN leadership role
- ICANN made over $500k in secret lawyer payments over [REDACTED] legal dispute
- .spa registry relocates to .xyz
- .forum sunrise period will cost less than half the regular reg fee
ICANN says no to Bulgarian ccTLD
Kevin Murphy,
May 19, 2010, 12:33:42 (UTC),
Domain Registries
Bulgaria can not have a localized-script version of its country-code domain .bg, because it looks too much like Brazil’s current ccTLD.
Bulgarian business daily Dnevnik is reporting that ICANN has turned down Bulgaria’s request for .бг, the Cyrillic translation of .bg, because it looks very much like .br.
Part of ICANN’s internationalized domain name fast-track process checks whether applied-for strings could be visually confusing. Clearly, this is one of them.
Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have already passed the test and have active IDN ccTLDs.
The Bulgarians are not giving up, however. Dnevnik reports that the country will most likely apply for .бгр instead.
Pick up rifle .. aim at foot .. fire!
ICANN’s rules about similarity of strings are one example where the Article 10 rights of the Applicant are engaged.
That is the say, the right of Bulgarians to freely express themselves, with a string of their choice to identify their country and/or culture.
Of course the right is not absolute, but qualified, but ICANN rules appear to embed an assumption of cultural superiority that implies that the Latin alphabet is somehow superior to the Cyrllic.
Where a public authority from a Member State is involved in such a decision (and most of the Council of Europe governments do participate in ICANN), they should consider carefully the balance that the Convention requires public authorities to draw between Article 10 and the other Convention rights.
Let’s hope the Council of Europe can educate ICANN once it joins the GAC this month!
Thanks for your comments Nigel.
I’m not sure I’d agree about the implicit cultural superiority of the Latin script.
I think ICANN’s call is simply a case of “first, do no harm”.
The ASCII ccTLDs were around long before ICANN. If the DNS were being designed today, I’d expect it would look very different.
You are referring to Dnevnik… Dnevnik is referring to a spokesman of the IT department of the Bulgarian government… The IT dept has not published that document in their web site.
Everyone is referring, but no one has seen it. No link. No fac-simile. Nothing.
I would like to see some explicit link to the official icann’s resolution. Please, help me to find it, if their is such document produced.
I don’t think ICANN has published a document on this issue.
Information relating to the delegation and redelgation of ccTLDs is usually treated relatively secretively.
If they did, you’d probably find it here:
http://icann.org/en/topics/idn/fast-track/announcements-en.htm
Thank you for the reply, Kevin. So far there is nothing. So I believe this Dnevnik saga is sort of anticipated manipulation.
[…] first choice, .бг, was rejected by ICANN/IANA in May due to its visual similarity to another ccTLD, believed to be Brazil’s […]
[…] rejected the string earlier this year due to its confusing similarity to Brazil’s ccTLD, […]
[…] this year, Bulgaria had its request for .бг (.bg) declined on the grounds that it looks too much like Brazil’s Latin ccTLD, .br and said it planned to […]
[…] string was rejected in May due to its what ICANN determined was its confusing visual similarity with Brazil’s ccTLD, […]
[…] domain, which had the backing of the Bulgarian government and people, was rejected in May on the grounds that it is “confusingly similar to an existing TLD”, believed to be […]
[…] readers will be familiar with the story of how Bulgaria’s request for .бг was rejected due to its similar to Brazil’s .br, but to my knowledge the Greeks had not revealed their […]
[…] country’s application for the Cyrillic label was rejected by ICANN’s IDN ccTLD Fast Track program last year because it was found to look too similar to […]
[…] country’s application for the Cyrillic label was rejected by ICANN’s IDN ccTLD Fast Track program last year because it was found to look too similar to […]