Bulgaria should move on from its desire to register .бг as the national Cyrillic Internet domain name, ICANN CEO and President Rod Beckstrom stated in an interview for Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency) and Novinite.bg.

Beckstrom, who was on his first visit to Bulgaria as the President of ICANN in November, commented on the issue with .бг – the desired Cyrillic domain by Bulgaria, which was rejected because of its visual similarity with the already existing Latin alphabet domain name of Brazil, .br.

"I would advise the Bulgarians to go for something else. The initial application for .бг was unsuccessful," said the ICANN chief.

"The job of ICANN, the organization, is to implement the policies that are developed by the global communities. Those communities did not allow the initial application to go through because of potential visual confusion. So I think the Bulgarians can go back and they can choose what they want to apply for. The Bulgarians can apply for a three-character name, they can apply for .българия in Cyrillic, it's really up to the local community. But it's great to see how much the local community cares," he added.

During Beckstrom's visit to Bulgaria in November 2011, Bulgaria's Deputy Transport and IT Minister Valeri Borisov Bulgaria can apply anew to register .бг by going for the "long procedure."

"There is going to be a round-table discussion in Sofia on January 4, 2012, where the community will get together, perhaps with the Deputy Minister, and they can explore all different options," Beckstrom said, stressing that Bulgaria has several different options with respect to the .бг Cyrillic domain.

"There are at least three different options. One is to wait for the policies to change and to participate in changing policies, and to apply again. The second possibility is to come up with another string (i.e. domain name extensions – editor's note) – whether it's three characters, or .българия in full or something - that's the second choice. The third choice is to abandon the concept and move on to other ideas – some new gTLD, for example. So it's really up to the community in Bulgaria to make those decisions," stated the head of ICANN.

"What we at ICANN will do is we will administer any process that's been approved by the Board professionally and fairly. And, by the way, Bulgaria was not the only applicant who had their string turned down because of visual confusion. There were others as well," he pointed out.

He noted that 30 different IDNs (i.e. internationalized domain names with characters different from the English version of the Latin alphabet – editor's note) are already in the Internet

"I think it's just important to people of the world that they have the opportunity to create domain names totally in their local script. So it's very popular – both in concept and in utilization – and we are really pleased now to see Chinese, Arabic, and so many other characters. We just approved seven different scripts for India because they have so many languages there. It's a very much appreciated program," Beckstrom commented.

Full Text of the interview of Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency) and Novinite.bg with ICANN President and CEO Rod Beckstrom READ HERE

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