Bulgaria (at long last) gets it own internationalized domain name (IDN)

bulgaria_idn

Five years ago, Bulgaria applied for an IDN but was denied by ICANN on the basis of “string similarity” with the country code of Brazil.

Here is the Bulgarian IDN side by side with Brazil’s ccTLD:  бг  br.

String similarity is a complex and controversial issue. But Bulgaria refused to take no for an answer and, five long years later, received approval.

I’ve updated our IDN map to include Bulgaria’s IDN (see detail above).

There are now 33 country/regions with IDNs.

John Yunker
John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.

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