Russian .RF (.РФ) Domains Now Open
The Registry for the .РФ (.RF) domain reported that 184’352 domains were registered on Thursday, as the extension become available to the public. More than 36’000 addresses were taken in the first hour alone.
The first 10 addresses registered Thursday were for nondescript, common nouns: работа.рф (work); видео.рф (video); автозапчасти.рф (auto parts); магазин.рф (store); бизнес.рф (business); игры.рф (games); телефон.рф (telephone); золото.рф (gold); квартира.рф (apartment); сайт.рф (site).
President Dmitry Medvedev, an avid Internet user, had lobbied global Internet oversight body ICAAN to introduce the Cyrillic names. In September 2008, he told an Internet conference that it would have “symbolic significance” for the Russian language.
The launch of the first IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) in Russia has not been without its own controversy. Russia has declined to close down the old .SU domain extension, despite several requests from ICANN. In fact sales of .SU have been encouraged in that time, with a new IDN form released.
The launch of .RF now means that Russia has three extensions, far more than any other country. RU is the best selling, with 3m registered addresses but .РФ (.RF) will open up a whole new market for them. Many Russian words and sounds can not be accurately represented with Latin characters.
The most popular letters in the addresses registered in the first hour were ы and я — Cyrillic characters with no equivalent in the Roman script, the center said on its web site.
Kolesnikov said the domains would allow Russian-speaking Internet users to feel at home on the web.
“The letter ё is what we were deprived of all these years using the English-language Internet,” he said. The character, pronounced “yo,” is often printed as a standard “e” in Cyrillic texts.
Most importantly Russian users will not have to change their keyboard language when surfing to an IDN .РФ (.RF) domain. As Internet internationalization and localization increases, that may give these new IDN domains a key advantage.
Click for more information or to register an .РФ (.RF) domain name.
