Cyrillic domain opens to all

نشرت 20 12, 2010 مؤلف CEO

Russia has started registering domains in Cyrillic in its .РФ domain. Private citizens and corporate bodies started opening their names in the Cyrillic zone of the Russian Internet on Thursday. At present, 18 thousand Internet users have Cyrillic domains and according to forecasts, this figure will increase up to 250 thousand on the future.

Those who acquire Cyrillic names will have no right to resell them to any other persons within a year, says the PR director of the Coordinating Centre of the .ru and .РФ, Andrei Vorobev.

“This move is aimed at restricting the activity of cyber-squatters who try to capitalize from a huge number of new registrations by reselling them for speculative purposes,” Andrei Vorobev said.

At the same time, some experts insist that the Cyrillic domain zone will not be popular among the Internet users, says the general director of the Dumarx marketing agency, Elena Rogacheva.

“The internet was introduced in the U.S., and consequently English has become its basic language,” says Elena Rogacheva. “The .РФ domain is accessible to those who have Cyrillic key boards, and this narrows sharply the zone of coverage,” Elena Rogacheva said.

However, in spite of forecasts by skeptics, Cyrillic zone is spreading across the World Wide Web. 240 thousand domain names were registered through the 24 hours and thus .рф domain entered 20 largest European domains' list. Serbia is the second country to acquire the Cyrillic zone after Russia that presented its own Internet domain in April.

The appearance of Cyrillic names on the Internet can be considered exclusively as the expansion of its space rather than self-isolation of the country from the world segment. English remains to be the language of international communications, and consequently, a large number of organizations will have addresses in both Cyrillic and non-Cyrillic zones because competitiveness of their products on the world market depends on this. 

Marina Volkova
Voice of Russia
http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/11/11/33367908.html