'.eu' internet domain to be available also in Cyrillic and Greek alphabets

Speakers of Bulgarian and Greek will soon be able to have .eu websites in their own languages. The European Commission has adopted new EU rules to make it possible for internet users and businesses to register domain names under .eu using the characters of all the 23 official languages of the European Union, now including Cyrillic and Greek scripts. This means that later this year .eu will also be available in the alphabets used by Bulgarians, Greeks and Cypriots and special characters used in other languages.

The European Commission today amended the rules for .eu so that it is possible for internet users to register .eu domain names using different alphabets such as Cyrillic or Greek.

Until now, domain names registered under the .eu top level domain could only contain the characters "a" to "z", digits "0" to "9" and "-". In future, it will be possible to register names using characters such as "à", "ą", "ä", "ψ" or "д" under ".eu". EU citizens and businesses will be able to register domain names in non-Latin scripts, which is essential for languages such as Greek and Bulgarian. At present, Bulgaria has one of the lowest number of registered .eu domains, at 9,578.

Thus far, Czechs could only use 27 of 42 characters, and Lithuanians 23 of 32. A new report of the Commission on the development of Europe's top level domain shows that the number of .eu domain names registered grew by 11 % in both 2007 and 2008.
It is expected that the new rules will further strengthen the attractiveness of Europe's top level domain name. To register for a .eu, domain name, web users must be established in one of the 27 EU Member States.

.eu has succeeded in becoming Europe's fourth most popular country code top level domain, surpassed only by .de (Germany), .uk (United Kingdom) and .nl (Netherlands). .eu is the ninth most used domain worldwide. For the first time, the official website of the Swedish EU Presidency can be found under a ‘.eu’ domain name, and by January 2009 there were 3 million of registered domains.

Background

Since first opening up to all EU residents and organisations established in the EU in April 2006, “.eu” has succeeded in gaining public favour. By its first anniversary, 2.5 million .eu domain names had been registered, and another 300,000 domain names were added in 2007. Permanently updated ".eu" statistics are available on the website of EURid.

EURid is an independent non-profit organisation which manages ".eu".