Russia: First Cyrillic Domains Go Online · Global Voices
Alexey Sidorenko

The first four Cyrillic domains went online by May 13: “президент.рф” (Russian president's Web site), “правительство.рф” (Government Web site), “кц.рф” (Coordination center of domain registration – Russian branch of ICANN) and “ник.рф” (National Center of Domain Registration). The event that Russian officials and bloggers were waiting for finally happened! Russia became the fourth country to introduce non-latin domains (after Saudi Arabia, Egypt and United Arab Emirates whose domains were introduced a week earlier [EN]).
The long-awaited initiative (GV has written about in November 2009 [EN]) caused enthusiasm and skepticism, as well as revealed browser problems. The most enthusiastic comments (sometimes too enthusiastic) were from the pro-government patriotic segment of RuNet. A press-release of “Molodaya Gvardia” youth organization proclaimed [RUS]:
Свершилось! 13 мая 2010 года (запомните этот день!) впервые в истории заработали сайты в кириллическом домене РФ. Два ресурса в новой зоне открыли президент и правительство. Россия первой в мире получила национальный государственный домен.
Aside from the ultra-patriotic comments, the interface for a Russian speaker and writer is interesting – writing the address feels way easier and user-friendly. At the same time, for most of the domains, a site structure remained intact (e.g. the post slugs were latin, which looks a little inconsequential):
Example of hybrid cyrillic-latin domain, screenshot from президент.рф
Blogger Stassia tweeted [RUS]:
класс! домен кириллический, а линки вглубь по-прежнему латиницей: президент.рф/news
tapka-fai added his comment on “http://” part of URL:
а http почему не по-русски? непорядок
User Co0L suggested [RUS] that the first cyrillic domain was the test domain http://пример.испытание/ (“example.test”).
Kryloshanin not only mocked the cyrillic domain initiative, but also analysed official statements on the topic [RUS]. Some of those looked quite surprising (and at the same time quite insightful). As the head of the Coordination Center put it [RUS]:
Теперь можно набирать их названия в любой поисковой системе, используя сразу русский язык, а не латиницу, как это было до сих пор”
Kryloshanin commented:
Вероятно, мы с директором Координационного центра национального домена в сети Интернет до настоящего времени по-разному пользовались поисковиками?
The sarcasm was supported with the printscreen of the “creative” browsing:
"Creative" browsing, printscreen by LJ-user Kryloshanin
Kryloshanin also discussed the other controversial thing that the Russian minister Shegolev stated [RUS] earlier. He said that search engines couldn't properly index cyrillic domains, which isn't quite true – Google shows index results for “кц.рф” [RUS]. At the same time, as antonblog.ru observes [RUS], Yandex.ru (Popular Russian search-engine) still was unable to index three cyrillic domains.
Rustex was sceptical [RUS] but did not show any sarcasm:
Ну что же – первый шаг к разъединению интернета сделан…
Очень жаль. Вообщем-то, второе падение Вавилонской башни.
Roem.ru reported [RUS] problems with showing the right address in Mozilla Firefox and Safari (the domain is represented in the following form: http://xn--j1ay.xn--p1ai/), Chrome and Internet Explorer showed the address intact.
May 2010 starts a new period in the development of the World Wide Web. It took 19 years to evolutionize to the system that is now emerging. The consequences of the non-latin domain names are still hard to forecast. It's understandable that they're might be both negative (destruction of the standardized information space, numerous technical problems, “ghettoization” or “nationalization” of the Web and following net restrictions/regulations of the national Internet spaces) and positive (emancipation of non-latin alphabet systems, user-friendlyness, possible implications for elimination of digital divide). However,  the real question remains open: how influential this change is? Will multi-alphabetical web revolutionalize the world or be used just for national self-consciousness?