The Russian president and government's websites have become the first to use addresses in Cyrillic Internet domain (.рф) after it was officially launched in Russia, the director of Russia's Coordination Center for the National Internet Domain said on Thursday.
The .рф is Russia's top-level domain for the Internet in Russian. Domain names must contain only letters from the Russian alphabet.
"On the night of the 12th-13th May, the first Cyrillic domain in the world as .рф was launched, the two first sites президент.рф (president.rf) and правительство.рф (pravitelstvo.rf) began operating," Andrei Kolesnikov said on the first Russian forum dedicated to Internet management which opened on Thursday in Moscow.
Kolesnikov said not all Internet browsers support the new domain.
The head of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) handed Kolesnikov a certificate giving Russia's Coordination Center for the National Internet Domain full authority over the operations of the new Russian Cyrillic domain.
In November 2008, .рф was approved by ICANN following a request by President Dmitry Medvedev. The domain is aimed at raising the status of Russian as a global language, and is hoped to expand Internet use among Russian speakers unfamiliar with Latin characters.
MOSCOW, May 13 (RIA Novosti)
