Rod Beckstrom,ICANN's CEO and President addressed the first Russian Internet Governance Forum in Moscow on May 13, 2010 .It was also commemorated the Russian Federation's successful efforts to bring Cyrillic characters to the nation's country code top-level domain, under ICANN's IDN ccTLD Fast Track program.
The speech was entitled "The future of ICANN:Toward a Global Internet " .
"Russia has taken a leading role in the advancement of global Internet,and has just achieved a milestone by becoming the first country to be approved for a Cyrillic internationalized domain name.",said Beckstrom .
"About 45 million Russians - 32 percent of the population -had access to the Internet in 2008.That number has seen ratcheting up in recent years.
The government of Russia and the Russian Internet community have ambitious plans to bring Internet service to the entire country,and they consider high-speed access the most important issue.Some might argue that domain names are not decisive factors in making the Internet more accessible,but internationalized domain names will open the door to those whose primary language is expressed in a non-Latin script,such as Russia speakers who use Cyrillic.
And that means many of the 96 million Russians not currently online could be among that billion." ,he added .
"The numbers are staggering:five of the top ten languages in use on the Internet today rely on a non-Latin script :Chinese,Japanese,Arabic,Russian and Korean,in roughly descending order .That represents 647 million users.And another 310 million fall into the broad category of other languages .
For the first time,these people will be able to write Internet addresses completely in their own script.IDNs are the greatest advance in the use of names on the Internet since its inception 40 years ago ."
You can read the entire speech here .