The European Commission (EC) announced on June 26 that it had adopted new rules for the registration of .eu domain names, which would make it possible to use the characters of all 23 official languages of the European Union.

As a result, .eu domain names could in future be registered in Cyrillic, as well as in Greek.

Currently, all domain names have to be written with a combination of the Latin characters a to z and 0 to 9. Accented characters and other alphabets are not accepted yet.

The new EC rules would also make it possible to use non-standard Latin characters, such as those used in Czech, Polish and Lithuanian, or accented Latin characters as used in French and German.

With just over three million registrations, the .eu domain had grown by 11 per cent over the past year, the EC said.

Currently, the .eu domain was the fourth most popular country code top level domain, surpassed only by .de (Germany), .nl (The Netherlands) and .uk (United Kingdom), and it was the ninth most used domain worldwide.

Currently, the .bg domain has one of the lowest number of registered domains in the European Union, with less than 10 000 domains.

It was not announced when the new registrations would become effective.