Nine years ago, on May 12, 2010, the Cyrillic domain .РФ was registered in the root servers of the global domain network. During these years, almost 2.8 million domain names have been registered in .РФ, and the domain itself ranks first among all “non-Latin” zones in terms of number of domain names. Forty-seven accredited registrars offer registration in the Russian Cyrillic domain zone.
The .РФ domain currently has 774,517 domain names; 693,000 (or 89.5%) of them are delegated. 33.8% of domain names in .РФ are over 5 years old. Every third (34.5%) platform in the Cyrillic domain has operating web resources; 23.3% more names are used for business card websites and web apps. 79% of domain names are registered by individuals, 21% by legal entities. In all, there are almost 370,000 administrators, that is, one administrator manages an average of two domain names.
“We congratulate our national Cyrillic domain .РФ and all who created and promoted it, including registrars, hosting providers and our colleagues and partners. .РФ continues to show good results and remains an example of a domain that uses the national alphabet. Next year it will mark its 10th anniversary, and I am sure that we will come to this date with great success,” said Andrey Vorobyev, director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ.
The growth of internet space that uses national alphabets – these are not only national domains, but also domains created by the ICANN’s program New gTLD –requires new efforts and comprehensive support of internationalized top-level domains. The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ is working in this area, for example, on April 7, 2019 in Moscow a decision was made to create a regional coordination group on universal acceptance among the CIS and Eastern European countries, as well as the Russian branch, the Russian Working Group on Universal Acceptance. These groups will engage in issues of universal acceptance of IDNs, new TLDs and email addresses that use non-Latin alphabets.
The .РФ domain zone was the first national Cyrillic domain zone: in 2009, ICANN approved the application to create the Russian top-level domain .РФ in which domain names for trademark owners soon began appearing, and on November 11, 2010, the right to register a domain name was opened to everyone. On the first day of open registration, over 240,000 domain names were registered; almost 700,000 registrations were submitted in the first month.
