INTERNET : .EU' DOMAIN AVAILABLE IN ALL 23 EU LANGUAGES.

Following the European Commission's 26 June 2009 decision, internet users and businesses have been able, since10 December, to register .eu' domain names(1) using any character from the 23 official languages of the EU, including notably Cyrillic and Greek alphabets (used by Bulgarians, Greeks and Cypriots) or those used by Spanish and Basque speakers. The Commission notes that internationalised domain names (IDNs) can now therefore use characters in addition to the 26 letters of the A-Z' Latin alphabet, the Hindu-Arabic numbers (0-9) and the hyphen sign that have been authorised to date.

The Commission, however, indicated that it also wanted to introduce, as soon as possible, variants of the internationalised domain names for the top level domain .eu' itself (for example .eu' transliterated into Greek or Cyrillic script). The Commissioner for Information Society, Viviane Reding, informed the Director-General of ICANN...