The domain name (

romanized In linguistics, romanization is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and transcription, ...

as ''.rf''; abbreviation of ) is the Cyrillic country code top-level domain for the

Russian Federation Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

, in the

Domain Name System The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed name service that provides a naming system for computers, services, and other resources on the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information ...

of the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

. In the Domain Name System it has the

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

DNS name . The domain accepts only

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...

subdomain applications, and is the first Cyrillic implementation of the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) system. The domain became operational on 13 May 2010. it is the most used internationalized country code top-level domain, with around 900,000 domain names.

Character set

The

Cyrillic letters The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Easte ...

, or the

. The domain has an ASCII representation of xn--p1ai derived as

Punycode Punycode is a representation of Unicode with the limited ASCII character subset used for Internet hostnames. Using Punycode, host names containing Unicode characters are transcoded to a subset of ASCII consisting of letters, digits, and hyphens, w ...

for use in the

. The domain is intended for Internet resources with names in the

Russian language Russian is an East Slavic languages, East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic languages, Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and is ...

using Cyrillic. A principle in the approval process of ICANN Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) states that Cyrillic two-character top-level domains should not exclusively use characters that could be confused with Latin characters of identical or similar shapes—not just those containing the seven letters , , , , , and , but originally also proposed ccTLDs such as (Bulgaria) due to its visual similarity to .br, although in 2016 the top-level domain was launched. As such, GNSO sought to avoid the direct transcription of "ru" into Cyrillic, "", and common abbreviations for ''Russia'' (), such as "", in order to avoid confusion with the Latin ccTLDs .py (

Paraguay Paraguay, officially the Republic of Paraguay, is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the Argentina–Paraguay border, south and southwest, Brazil to the Brazil–Paraguay border, east and northeast, and Boli ...

) and .po ( unassigned). In English sources can be romanized as .rf, but the latter is not a valid domain for Russia. Later, other countries have won approval of two or three letter Cyrillic ccTLDs such as , , , , , and .

Early preparations

The preparation, development, and technical testing of the domain started in 2007 by registrar RU Center. The domain delegation process started in November 2009 as an application to ICANN under the new Fast Track IDN ccTLD process. The domain is expected to be launched in 2010. In preparation for a launch, RU Center opened a ''sunrise'' registration period for Russian trademark owners from 25 November 2009 to 25 March 2010. General public registrations are planned starting 20 April 2010 through June 2010 using a

Dutch auction A Dutch auction is one of several similar types of auctions for buying or selling goods. Most commonly, it means an auction in which the auctioneer begins with a high offer price in the case of selling, and lowers it until some participant accep ...

process, and at a fixed price beginning in July 2010. In January 2010 ICANN announced that the domain was one of the first four new non-Latin ccTLDs to have passed the Fast Track String Evaluation within the domain application process. In a press release in December 2007, Alexei Lesnikov of RU-Center suggested that an auction for domain names could be highly successful, as was the case with a similar domain name auction on the .su

ccTLD A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all tw ...

. With comparisons being made with an equivalent Chinese TLD of , it was anticipated that take-up of a Russian Cyrillic TLD could outstrip demand for the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

equivalent, .ru. however, .ru has five times as many registrations as .

First use

The top-level domain became operational on the Internet on 13 May 2010. The first two accessible sites were (''president'') and (''government'').

Related domains

The traditional

country code top-level domain A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all tw ...

(ccTLD) for Russia, based on the ISO country codes, is . There is no direct mapping of subdomains between and , they are independent domains hosting potentially different resources. However, many resources may use

URL redirection URL redirection, also called URL forwarding, is a World Wide Web technique for making a web page available under more than one URL address. When a web browser attempts to open a URL that has been redirected, a page with a different URL is opened. ...

or DNS pointers to provide mapping between the name spaces. For example, the URLs (prezident) redirects to kremlin.ru, and (

Yandex Yandex LLC ( rus, Яндекс, r=Yandeks, p=ˈjandəks) is a Russian technology company that provides Internet-related products and services including a web browser, search engine, cloud computing, web mapping, online food ordering, streaming ...

) redirects to yandex.ru.

Second-level domains

The second-level domain names are registered directly with user-defined names, such as company names. There are no standardized category names (such as com or org) used on the second level. The second-level domain names are only intended to have Cyrillic characters, but some have Latin characters (e.g., ), or digits instead (e.g., ) For the third-level names, it is fairly common that "www" (Latin characters) are used, but most main company addresses do not use any third-level name.

References

External links

ICANN country-code name supporting organization

Discussion by GNSO about which IDN ccTLD to use for different countries

Coordination Center for TLD RU
{{DEFAULTSORT:rf рф Internet in Russia Internet properties established in 2010