First Cyrillic Domain Launched in Russia
2010/05/31
First Cyrillic Domain Launched in Russia
On May 13, 2010, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) officially delegated the first Cyrillic domain .рф to Russia at the Internet Governance Forum in Moscow. The first two websites available on .рф are the Russian president and government’s websites президент.рф and правительство.рф.
The letters .рф are equivalent to the Latin letters rf, short for the Russian Federation. According to RIA Novosti, all Internet browsers support the new domain and the domain names must contain only letters from the Russian alphabet.
In January 2010, the ICANN announced that Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the first four countries that met a specific set of linguistic and technical requirements for domain names written entirely in local scripts.
The Russian Cyrillic domain aims to affirm the status of Russian as a world language and make Internet use easier for Russian speakers unfamiliar with Latin letters. According to RIA Novosti, the number of websites with the .рф suffix may reach up to 50,000 by the end of this year.
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