Russian Internet users seem eager to be able to use their own Cyrillic characters. So much so that some people are already talking about a 2008 launch for .RU IDNs.
Russia's County Code manager ccTLDru is likely to be among the early adopters of fully localized domain names
Whenever people talk IDNs, there automatically seems to be a lot of confusion generated. Recent Internet stories on the possible upcoming launch of a "Russian Cyrillic Domain" show that many people still do not understand what Internationalized Domain Names are about.
With some going as far as to announce that a Cyrillic Russian TLD is to be launched in 2008, that testing is complete and that nearly 5,000 bids have already been received for the new domain, Domaines.info contacted the Coordination Center for TLD RU or ccTLDru, the registry in charge of managing Russia's .RU Internet suffix.
"The article you mention is full of misunderstandings," was ccTLDru's Maria Mokina unequivocal response.
A special IDN .RU suffix for Cyrillic characters
What exactly are we talking about anyway? The IDN project in question is for a localized TLD where not only the domain name could be written in Cyrillic but its .RU extension as well.
"The tests being done are still going on at the IDN wiki website, nothing more," confirmed Mokina, a project manager for ccTLDru.
The issues associated with the introduction of an IDN .RU extension are being investigated. "One of the main concerns about IDN implementation is overlapping of Cyrillic & Latin characters," says Mokina. "To avoid user confusion and possible speculation, it was recommended by the .RU IDN Working Group, firstly, not to mix Cyrillic and Latin characters in IDNs and, secondly, to clearly identify that a domain name is in Cyrillic. Take a name like coca.ru (cyrillic.latin), visually it cannot be identified as being an IDN (it looks like latin.latin). But coca.??, where "??" is a specific IDN TLD, can. The solution therefore is to use a specific suffix with unique Cyrillic character."
ICANN will have to finish testing IDN TLDs before they can be introduced by Country Code managers. But once that happens, expect Russia to be at the front of the queue.
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