Yekaterina Alymova, Legal Counsel at the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, and Marina Rozhkova, Chair of the Coordination Center’s Legal Committee, President of IP CLUB, and Doctor of Law, spoke at the roundtable UNESCO’s 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions: Outcomes and Prospects, which took place on June 17, 2025, at the Higher School of Economics. The event was organized by the UNESCO Chair on Copyright, Neighboring, Cultural, and Information Rights at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (UNESCO Chair at HSE) and the Likhachev Russian Research Institute for Cultural and Natural Heritage.
Participants discussed the global implementation of the Convention, the socioeconomic and legal aspects of safeguarding cultural diversity, and prospects for refining domestic cultural legislation in the context of developing creative industries and preserving the cultural heritage of Russia’s peoples.
Experts from the Coordination Center presented a report titled “Challenges in Using Cyrillic and National Alphabets of Russia’s Indigenous Peoples in Domain Names and Email Addresses,” detailing how Cyrillic and national alphabets are employed in domain names and email addresses, as well as the obstacles users face.
Yekaterina Alymova provided an in-depth explanation of the domain name system and the role of internationalized domain names (IDNs), including the .РФ domain.
Marina Rozhkova, a member of the Russian Working Group on Universal Acceptance, introduced participants to the concept of Universal Acceptance (UA) and the activities of the working group, established in 2020 to promote UA adoption in Russia.
Rozhkova noted that on May 12, 2025 – the 15th anniversary of Russia’s Cyrillic domain .РФ – a Memorandum on the Development of Support for Internet Addressing Tools in the State Language of the Russian Federation was signed. The document was endorsed by ccTLD registries, several civil society organizations, and universities specializing in the advancement of the Russian language online, including Moscow State Linguistic University (MSLU) and Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University). Additional organizations continue to join the initiative. She also highlighted that the .РФ domain actively supports Russia’s indigenous languages. In 2025, the character set was expanded to include 25 new letters (Ӑ, Ҕ, Ҫ, Ҥ, Җ, Ҙ, Ң, Ӧ, Ҡ, Ӳ, and others), enabling domain registrations in 17 indigenous languages.
The report by Yekaterina Alymova and Marina Rozhkova sparked extensive discussion. Roundtable participants emphasized the importance of promoting Cyrillic script and incorporating Russia’s national languages online. Such efforts, they argued, can help mitigate the decline of languages spoken by many of the country’s indigenous communities.
