Armenian tech website Arka Telecom recently did a story on a curious reason for the extremely low performance of the Armenian national domain .հայ (.xn--y9a3aq). Designated by ICANN in 2015, this domain still has about 300 names registered within it. This is less than 1 percent of the total number of sites registered in Armenia’s other national domain .am, which is doing quite well.
The problem, it seems, is in how Armenian script uses punctuation. In Armenian, a full stop, or a verjaket, is represented by two vertically aligned dots, known to us a colon, while the colon itself is represented by a single dot. That is the source of the problem.
“Initially, Armenian representation of a full stop was registered in the international system and got a special code for electronic systems to be able to recognize it,” Arka Telecom says, citing Grigory Sagiyan, Vice-President of the Internet Society of Armenia (ISOC AM). “However, within the framework of the .հայ domain name, many systems fail to recognize the full stop, identifying it as colon.” As a result, servers fail to identify domain names properly, redirecting users to search results. The Armenian IT community is willing to host a public discussion on this problem and bring up the possibility of replacing the symbols, Sagiyan said.
