The third International Mobile Conference #MBLT14 took place in Moscow on Friday, May 23, gathering IT experts from around the world. The agenda focused on new projects, reports, interviews and debates on the most important and up-to-date issues.
Olga Alexandrova-Myasina, the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ’s head of information service, spoke at the conference. She discussed internationalized domain names (IDN) and problems hindering their development in the modern Internet landscape.
She said the Cyrillic domain, .РФ, has had great influence on the development of IDNs. “The .РФ domain is the world’s largest IDN and a model inspiring many national registrars to search for innovative marketing solutions and to promote internationalized domains to customers in their countries,” she said.
She also touched upon some serious problems that are, in her opinion, inhibiting further IDN development around the world, preventing end users from fully employing the advantages of such domains. She pointed out the lack of support for internationalized domain names from some popular apps, as well as the absence of a full-fledged email system in these domains.
“The Coordination Center has been working consistently for the past two years to eliminate these problems. It proved fairly easy to resolve IDN support problems with most popular browsers; what is now left is dealing with email client support. We have contacted the global Internet giants Facebook and Microsoft, asking them for assistance in organizing email support in non-Latin alphabet-based domains, and have reached a general agreement on improving the necessary services. We have now sent similar requests to other major developers of Internet services and email apps. Negotiations on the development of new possibilities and the introduction of new protocols are underway,” she said.
