Introduced 2012 Registry рнидс.срб (RNIDS) | Status Active Sponsor RNIDS | |
TLD type Internationalised (Cyrillic) country code top-level domain Intended use Entities connected with Serbia | ||
.срб (romanized as .srb; abbreviation of Serbian: Србија/Srbija) is the Internationalised (Cyrillic) Internet country code top-level domain (IDN ccTLD) for Serbia. It has been active since May 3, 2011.
The Serbian National Internet Domain Registry (RNIDS) has initiated on its forum (www.forum.rnids.rs) a public discussion on the Proposal of rules and processes for registering the Cyrillic domain “.срб”.
The Proposal of rules and processes for registering the Cyrillic domain “.срб” is available on the forum of RNIDS. It regulates the registration of the sub-domain “.срб” and the reservation of other domains for the needs of RNIDS, the reservation of the “.срб” domain for the needs of the state, the reservation of the “.срб” domain based on the current .rs domain names and the allocation of the unique code to each and every reserved “.срб” domain.
The Rule book also determines the period for assigning the “.срб” domain according to the priority right, after which the period of free registration of the “.срб” domain will commence, based on the same or similar rules now applicable for the .rs domain.
The process of registering the Cyrillic domain “.срб” had been expected to commence in the second half of 2011, but is postponed and it was started on 27 January 2012, due to some technical issues considering the documentation.
“.срб” has, in many fonts, a very similar appearance to the Latin alphanumeric .cp6, which is not registered as a TLD. Similarly proposed TLDs .бг (for Bulgaria) and .ελ (for the Greece) have been rejected or stalled because of this problem, but “.срб” has not. The general policy for internationalized TLDs is to require at least one of the letters in a TLD to not resemble a Latin letter; 6 is a numeric digit (not a Latin letter) and is not used in any TLDs. Furthermore, though б appears similar to a 6 in most Cyrillic alphabets, it does not in Serbian, where it more closely resembles Greek lowercase delta (δ), see the relevant section in the article on the letter б.
Advantage
“.срб” domain has one specific advantage – it is the only Internet domain in Europe that allows website addresses to be written exactly the way they are pronounced (some Arabic and the Korean domain also allow that). Thanks to the characteristic of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet where each phoneme has its own letter-counterpart, the .СРБ domain name addresses – as opposed to the multitude of domain names written in the English alphabet – are unequivocally pronounced exactly the way they are written. (some generic domains such as .com, .net, .london and many more also allow that)