On May 18 and 19, 2017, the mineral water resort of Pyatigorsk, the capital of the North Caucasus Federal District, hosted a celebration of the anniversary of the .РФ domain. The festivities were organized as part of the program dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the Pyatigorsk State University’s Information Technologies Department.
The central event was a roundtable, which was opened by University Rector Alexander Gorbunov. The participants discussed the place and role of Cyrillic in the Internet landscape, in particular in the domain segment, the specifics of promoting Cyrillic top-level domains and the technical difficulties involved in supporting them. They also looked at the results of the Petition from Internationalized Domain Names Registries addressed to mail services and social networks, and proposed further steps for the internationalization of the Internet infrastructure. Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrei Vorobyev reported on active negotiations with the company Yandex, the social networking site VK.com and the 1C-Bitrix software and cloud products developer. As a result, we can expect that in the near future, most users of these services will be able to work with links written in Russian, he said.
The analytical report of young scientists from Pyatigorsk State University on the impact of information technology on the development of the modern Russian language and the new features it acquires when used online, aroused great interest. University teacher Nikolai Kovalyov spoke about how the lexical meaning of words varies depending on their use in various contexts when communicating on the Internet, and Grigory Mkhitaryan shared the results of his research into changes in punctuation rules.
The anniversary celebrations included several educational events for schoolchildren from Pyatigorsk. Coordination Center specialists gave them a lesson on the basic rules of safe behavior on the network, and the history of the global Internet and its Russian segment. The lecture was followed by a quiz based on the educational project of the Coordination Center and Rostelecom, Explore The Internet & Govern It!
The Cyrillic .РФ domain was delegated to Russia on May 12, 2010. Today .РФ is the most successful IDN-domain (link to the report https://cctld.ru/files/stats/report_ru-2017_eng2.pdf) and the largest Cyrillic domain in the world. Pyatigorsk State University, a major educational, research and innovation center in the North Caucasus and southern Russia, widely known in our country and abroad, is a partner of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ for the organization of the .РФ domain anniversary.
