On December 15, the TASS press center hosted an online conference dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the Cyrillic country-code domain, .РФ, and the projects launched to mark this date and aimed at expanding the use of the Russian language on Runet, as well as the first year results of the Поддерживаю.РФ (which stands for I Support .РФ) project.
The news conference was attended by Andrey Vorobyev, Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ; Sergey Plugotarenko, Director of the Russian Association for Electronic Communications (RAEC); Alexander Ivanyuk, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Russian Association of Networks and Services (RANS); Svetlana Liyenko, Executive Director of the hosting provider and domain registrar REG.RU; Vladimir Pakhomov, research fellow at the Vinogradov Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, editor-in-chief of Gramota.ru website; and Andrey Mukhanov, Vice-Rector for International Affairs and Public Relations at MTUCI university.
Andrey Vorobyev opened the event by noting that the growing use of TLDs allowing registration of domain names containing national script characters is one of the main trends in the development of the internet. .РФ firmly holds the first place among Cyrillic top-level domains and is one of the top 20 European ccTLDs, both in terms of the number of registrations and the growth rate. As of the end of 2020, 723,000 domains were registered in it, with 92 percent of them delegated (meaning actually used) and 79 percent registered by individuals.
Speaking of projects launched to mark to the anniversary of the main Russian Cyrillic domain, Andrey Vorobyev mentioned a special session, Домен.РФ: Easy to remember, difficult to forget, at the RIF.Online conference; the nationwide project Digital dictation – 10 years of TLD .РФ: Internet in Russian; a joint study with the UASG on the acceptance of Cyrillic email addresses; as well as participation in events for professional and youth IT audiences, including Digital Breakthrough hackathon competitions, the youth summer school CTF, and a series of trainings conducted by the Coordination Center.
The last in the series of festive events to mark the .РФ anniversary was the Runet Prize award ceremony; this year, it included a special category to recognize companies, educational institutions and authorities that have made the greatest contribution to the promotion of the Russian language in the national segment of the internet. The awardees included the Vinogradov Russian Language Institute, Rostourism federal agency, RU-CENTER, as well as the Russian Association of Networks and Services’ (RANS) partner department at MTUCI and the ГодЛитературы.РФ website. Each of them was presented with a special statuette with the .РФ logo instead of the regular one with .RU.
RAEC Director Sergey Plugotarenko gave his best wishes to the .РФ domain and said: “Today, after ten years of growth, we can confidently say .РФ is a success – not only do we have a Cyrillic ccTLD, but one actively used by businesses, individual users and authorities.” MTUCI Vice-Rector Andrey Mukhanov, in turn, noted that a national domain’s growth, along with the development and promotion of domestic software, is the most important component of a state's technological sovereignty.
Vladimir Pakhomov from the Vinogradov Russian Language Institute spoke about an online Russian language project, the academic Russian language spelling dictionary Academos. “We have developed an electronic dictionary that includes new words that were added to the Russian language in recent years, so checking their spelling is a matter of few seconds on our website,” he added.
REG.RU Executive Director Svetlana Liyenko added that, while the .РФ domain is being actively used for hosting sites, there are still problems with support of Cyrillic email. “REG.RU has collaborated with the Поддерживаю.РФ project to create a test rig that supports fully Cyrillic emails so that developers can practice using them. If the testing goes well, users of shared hosting services will be able to register email addresses in Russian next year,” she said.
Andrey Vorobyev elaborated on the Поддерживаю.РФ project, a noticeable milestone in celebrating ten years of the main Cyrillic domain, as well as the most important tool in promoting Universal Acceptance, which is still new for the Runet. The project, launched in May 2020, aims to help software developers implement full IDN and EAI support in their products, and to assist system administrators in choosing and correctly configuring software that has such functionality. The project website contains a collection of Russian-language documentation on working with internationalized domain names and email addresses, including standards and best practices for implementing them in software, as well as a regularly updated catalog of software products with an indication of their current IDN and EAI protocol support status.
“We have created a unique resource center for Universal Acceptance and use of Cyrillic domains and email addresses. Thousands of IT professionals were able to read up on Unicode support in domain names, and the most active ones learned how to solve such problems in practice. The project also brought the problem of domain names using the Russian alphabet to the attention of the Runet technical community, and developers began adjusting some important software products. All this constitutes a big step forward, which we have taken together, and which brought us closer to the implementation of full support for the Russian language in the Runet,” Andrey Vorobyev emphasized.
