Reuters Press Agency is reporting that as part of the Kremlin’s initiative to promote Russian as a global language, the nation’s president Dmitry Medvedev sent a request to ICANN requesting a dedicated Internet domain name for Russia in the Cyrillic script.
Medvedev, who views the move as a matter of Russian pride, said that 300 million people around the world use the Russian media, and that a Cyrillic domain name would play a central role in raising the importance of Russian as a language. The mission is his personal priority as president, he said. "We must do everything we can to make sure that we achieve in the future a Cyrillic Internet domain name -- it is a pretty serious thing," said Medvedev, addressing the International Congress of Russian Press in Moscow...
As with most other domain names, Russian Internet sites use a Latin script, with addresses ending in either the suffix .ru, or even .su, a holdover from the former Soviet Union. But experts say Russia wants its domain name to be .rf, short for Russian Federation, but written in the Cyrillic script instead of Latin script.
But some skeptics are concerned it could allow the state additional control of the content. It is particularly troubling because the Internet has remained a fairly free arena in which to air dissent, even as the nation’s traditional media has fallen under tighter government control.
The Russian language is the sixth most widely spoken language in the world, following Mandarin, English, Hindi/Urdu, Arabic and Spanish. It is also one of the United Nations' six main languages.
Source: Reuters Germany Post - June 14th, 2008 - Posted by Roland Buck - Chief Editor for DomainNews.com