From the very start, Internet was entirely English — American English, to be precise. Originating from Arpanet, which prime purpose was to aid the information sharing over the government defense agency, the network standards didn’t seem to care of those who don’t speak English. But things change, and now, according to ICANN, more than half of multimillion Internet audience use non-Latin alphabets in their mother tongues. Despite being negative at first, ICANN has finally responded to a global call for nationalised domain names, and recently announced the program for ‟…delegating a number of internationalized top-level domains”. In layman’s terms, it means that the unipolar Internet world of ICANN holding all the strings in one hand would develop to distributed system, with each country having a body that manages nationalized top-level domains.

Russian officials were among the first who’ve applied. President Dmitry Medvedev is excited about the opportunities to deploy a range of government services over .рф zone, which stands for Russian Federation — but, according to The New York Times, there are other opinions. Technologists express their concerns on new and potentially unstable systems to be introduced; business people don’t see a reasonable ROI in having Russian site names as registrars made sure to make a fortune out of this. Interesting also is the fact that English version of the same page doesn’t list ridiculous prices like ~$350.000 for any domain at the opening day. Alex Gostev of Kaspersky lab notes that it would be a whole new field for fraudsters — and businesses agree: lots of them will be acquiring Cyrillic domains for the only reason of protecting themselves from scam and cybersquatting.

Despite of potential issues, there is a positive side to this novelty. People who are not familiar with English would find native language domain names easier to read and memorize, which will potentially increase the Internet use and penetration. The global network is commonly associated with freedom of speech and thought, ease of access to the most recent information and news etc — so making it easily reachable for the whole new audience is a positive thing indeed. There are concerns expressed in the same NYT article that ‟local internets” would be somewhat hermetic — but they might as well serve as a bridge to global space for those who haven’t had such a possibility in other cases.

Bottom line is, the whole process of introducing non-Latin zones is quite rough around the edges, bringing both problems and opportunities — as any innovation is in its early days. Lots of tech issues to be solved, and lot of political questions as well, which we don’t touch, being a technology company. Let us hear from you instead: what do you think about the future of nationalized domains?

Written by: Yuriy Pryadko

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.
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One Response to “Russian Wide Web. Introducing cyrillic domain names”

• Michael Shraybman says:

  January 6, 2010 at 2:03 am

  IMHO introducing Cyrillic domain names is like introducing a Russian version of Java language – it goes against the unifying and borderless nature of Internet and is a step back. I can see this concept working for some exclusive clubs that want to be off-limits to the outside world.