Belarus Launches Cyrillic Domain .бел

The sunrise period for the registration of the recently launched Belarus Cyrillic domain names is underway, ending on May 31. From March 1 to May 31, the priority has been given to trademark owners, who can register domain names matching their trademarks.

From June 1 — September 30, which is the landrush period, some attractive domains will be sold through charity auctions, while the general availability period starts on October 1.

Registration will be available for domain names in Russian and Belarusian, and in addition to the standard Cyrillic characters, “ў”, “і” and apostrophes will also be supported. The registration policy will be the same as that for the Latin .by.

On August 26, 2014, ICANN approved Belarus’s application for the Cyrillic country code top-level domain extension .бел (.bel in Latin) in addition to the existing Latin .by.

Russian .рф (.rf in Latin) was the first Cyrillic domain, delegated to Russia in May 2010. Apart from Russia and Belarus’s Cyrillic domains, there are Macedonia’s .мкд (.mkd in Latin), Serbia’s (.срб, or .srb in Latin), Kazakhstan’s (.каз, or .kaz in Latin), Ukraine’s (.укр, or .ukr in Latin) and Mongolia’s (.мон, or .mon in Latin). Bulgaria’s (.бг, or .bg in Latin) will be launched in the near future.

Prepared by: Aleksandra Pavlovic

For more information, please contact mail@petosevic.com.

Source: ICANN, Belarusian press and registrars for .БЕЛ domains