The regional Cyrillic domain .ukr is unlikely to be registered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Internet Invest Ltd. President Oleksandr Olshansky considers.
According to Olshansky, the main reason for this is the peculiarities of the rules for non-Latinic domains recently approved by the company, under which at least one letter should differ in the shape from the corresponding Latin one.
On Nov. 17 Ukrainian Channel 5 reported that an application for the registration of the Cyrillic .ukr domain had been submitted to the ICANN.
The participants in the Internet market polled by Interfax-Ukraine did not confirm the report, but said the application could have been be submitted by Ukrnames Ltd. (Center of Internet Names of Ukraine, Kharkiv), which earlier provided services on the registration of names with the .ukr domain, for which users have to have additional software.
In June 2008 the ICANN approved a document that foresees the introduction of high-level domain names in Cyrillic and other national non-Latin alphabets.
