Medvedev Gets Wish For .ðô Domain
By Maria Antonova
The St. Petersburg Times
MOSCOW — The world’s governing body for Internet domain names voted Friday to allow the use of non-Latin characters, clearing the way for the .ðô suffix and web sites named in Cyrillic. The first step in a long effort to make the Internet less reliant on the Latin alphabet allows “nations and territories to apply for Internet extensions … made up of characters from their national language,” the not-for-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, said in a statement following a weeklong summit in Seoul, South Korea. President Dmitry Medvedev — who has his own video blog and claims to be conversant in Russian web slang, known as Olbanian — made acquiring Cyrillic web addresses an early priority of his administration. But commercial web site operators in Russia shrugged off the changes, saying they would provide more flexibility but were unlikely to attract masses of new users. “This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and a historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet,” Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s president and CEO, said in the statement. “We just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.” ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush called it “the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago.” The U.S. Commerce Department opened the U.S.-based ICANN to broader international oversight on Sept. 30, after years of criticism that Washington had a stranglehold on Internet regulation. Russia will submit its .ðô application Nov. 16, the first day ICANN starts accepting them, said Andrei Kolesnikov, president of the Coordination Center for Top Level Domain RU, the organization tasked with overseeing Russian domain names. There are more than 2 million domains registered under the .ru domain, which the center oversees. The .ðô suffix will officially be delegated to Russia in February or March, said Maria Mokina, a spokeswoman for the coordination center. Initially, registration within the new top-level domain — .ðô — will be limited to government bodies, major cities and trademark owners. Mokina said the Cyrillic domain would not lead to segregation of the RuNet, as the Russian Internet is known, since sites can always register both domain names, while search engines index based on the site’s content. Accredited registrars in Russia will accept applications for Cyrillic second-level domain names from trademark holders from Nov. 25 to March 25, the Coordination Center for TLD RU said in a statement. Priority registration will end in April 2010. Second-level domains are the unique identifier — typically a name or brand — that precedes the top-level domain in a web address. The coordination center has developed a road map for introducing the new domain, which is available on its web site. One of the key principles is to keep a list of forbidden domain names that contain “words that go against public interest, principles of humanity and morals … inhumane slogans that insult human dignity or religious feelings, etc.” Mokina confirmed that the “stop-list mechanism” would be used but said the rules were still being finalized. “There will most likely be a static stop-list of obvious swear words,” she said. “But the issues of individual perception of insulting words have not been entirely resolved.” Initial calls for a Cyrillic domain name were met with skepticism on some parts of the Internet, amid fears that it could be used to control content. German Klimenko, owner and CEO of popular social network LiveInternet.ru, said he wasn’t worried about possible abuse of the system. “The practice of setting limits to registration is not unheard of, Russia is not unique,” he said. Industry experts played down the importance of the .ðô for spreading Internet usage or the Russian language. “The Cyrillic domain will simply add another technical option,” Klimenko said. “I don’t see any positive or negative aspects to it.” Asked whether LiveInternet.ru was planning to apply for æèâîéèíòåðíåò.ðô, he said he had never thought about it. “We’ll probably apply, but we will have to think about the name,” he said. “Users are attracted to services, not domain names,” said Tatyana Komarova, spokeswoman for Yandex, the country’s search engine. Yandex will start registering Cyrillic domains for its services when the application process begins but does not expect them to bring in more users, she said. “It’ll just add another type of domain, we don’t see any positive or negative aspects to it.” Yandex already indexes web sites where the domain name is in Cyrillic but the suffix is in Latin, she said. Andrei Vorobyov, a spokesman for RU-Center, one of the registrars, said .ðô was likely to have a different audience, “targeted for the local community,” while .ru would appeal to a wider range of Internet users, including foreign ones. Medvedev lined up behind the .ðô domain in the first months of his presidency, casting it as a matter of national prestige. “We must do everything we can to make sure that we achieve in the future a Cyrillic Internet domain name. It’s a pretty serious thing,” he told a Russian-language journalism congress in June 2008. “It is a symbol of the importance of the Russian language and Cyrillic.” Communications and Press Minister Igor Shchyogolev told an Internet conference last month that “Russia would be the first country to use domains in a national language.” The localization of names “will help remove the language barrier,” leading to “further increases in the number of Internet users in Russia,” he said. In May, Shchyogolev estimated that Russia would see a 34 percent increase in Internet users this year to almost 63 million people, from 47 million in 2008. According to a poll of 94,000 Russians over the age of 18 conducted this summer by the Public Opinion Foundation, 35 percent use the Internet at least once every six months, or 39.9 million people. Eighteen percent, or 21.3 million, said they were daily users. The figures were 24 percent and 9 percent, respectively, in the summer of 2007.
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