On November 11, 2020, the .РФ domain will celebrate 10 years of open registration: exactly 10 years ago, domain registration in the first Cyrillic domain zone became open to the general public.
Although the official inception of the .РФ domain is May 12, 2010, when an entry on the new domain zone was added to the internet root zone, November 11 is an important date because the results of the first day of open registration produced a sensation. More than 240,000 Cyrillic domain names were registered on that day, showing the world that domains in a non-Latin based script can be successful and popular. That extremely successful beginning had a positive impact on the further development of IDNs and their proliferation around the world.
“The introduction of the .РФ domain was followed by the appearance of 16 other Cyrillic TLDs. The majority of countries using the Cyrillic script have them now, and a number of such domains have also been registered within the New gTLD Program coordinated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). I have no doubt that the program’s second stage will add many more Cyrillic domain names to the global domain space. The Coordination Center has a considerable amount of practical experience with regard to launching and promoting the .РФ domain, and we are ready to share it with our colleagues,” said Andrey Vorobyev, director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ.
As of today, over 720,000 domain names have been registered in the .РФ zone, 91.9 percent of them have been delegated, which means that they are ready to be used on the internet. The .РФ domain is the 19th largest country-code domain in Europe and the only non-Latin domain in the top 20 group. In the period of 10 years since its establishment, the .РФ domain has become the world’s largest Cyrillic domain and the second largest national IDN domain.
