Russian IDN ccTLD .рф Opens for Registrations, Makes History
November 11, 2010, marked the day when the new IDN ccTLD .рф (Cyrillic for Российская Федерация, Russian Federation) was opened for general registration. Prior to that date the registration was open only for trademark owners and governmental institutions. Before the registration started, in an interview for the КоммерсантЪ (Commersant) daily, Andrey Kolesnikov, CEO of the Coordination Center for .ru and .рф, said that they expect to have about 100,000 domain names registered by the end of the year. It turned out they needed less than three hours to reach to the 100,000 domain names! Such a gold rush was not expected, and numbers continued to grow – 200,000 within 6 hours from the beginning of the registration period. And more than 460,000 by today. The registration process, which clearly exceeded (and continues to exceed) all expectation, includes some interesting details, for example there is a list of 4023 words, which are not allowed for registration. The so-called “black list” contains variations of all different vulgar words, known in the Russian language. However, users have already found ways to bypass it, with simply adding another word in front, or after the...
Published By: ICANN blog » IDNs - Saturday, 17 September, 2011
