YEREVAN, February 7. /ARKA/.  The .Հայ (.hay) domain, an Internet country code top-level domain, provided to Armenia by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), designated for two-letter country code AM, and  intended for domain names in the Armenian language, active since 2016, is not progressing because of the way the full stop punctuation mark is used in the Armenian language, vice-president of the Internet Society (ISOC) public organization Grigory Saghiyan told reporters on Thursday.

He said after the Armenian transcription of the full stop was introduced  (in Armenian, full stop punctuation mark  looks like a Russian or English colon, while one dot  means a colon), electronic systems recognized it. However, now  the systems do not recognize the full stop as such, perceiving it as a colon.

According to him, as a result  the sites are not recognized by the servers. The  system does not go to  the domain, but sends the user to a search engine. He said the Armenian IT community plans to hold public discussions to look into  the expediency of replacing these symbols.

According to Saghiyan, the use of Armenian-language domain names provides owners with a number of advantages, including marketing ones, since regional domain names are first of all issued in search engines.

Liana Galstyan, head of external relations of the Internet Society, noted that at the moment 300 sites are registered in the new domain zone, including commercial organizations and government agencies, but  not all of them actively use their sites, mainly doing it to redirect to their sites with Latin names. She said the domain is free for schools.

The Latin domain .am is the official domain of Armenia, which  appeared in August 1994. –0–