Internet and society: .RF Cyrillic domain is celebrating its second anniversary

May 13, 2012 .RF Cyrillic domain is celebrating its second anniversary. During this time the zone had expended to 800,000 domain names. In 2010, on the night of 12 to 13 May, the first sites of the Russian Cyrillic domain zone .RF started operating. Today the number of working domains is nearly 600,000.

95.68% of all domain names of Cyrillic zone .RF are registered in Russia. The three geographic leaders by the number of registered domains include Moscow (32.48% of all registered domain names in April), Moscow Region (8.8%) and St. Petersburg (8.14%). Domain .RF has spread beyond the borders of the homeland. The four countries leading in the number of registered .RF domains after Russia are Switzerland, the United States, Germany and Ukraine.

RF domain zone was the first national Cyrillic domain zone: in 2009, ICANN approved the application for the creation of the .RF Cyrillic top-level domain, soon the registration of the names of trademark owners began, and in 2010 everyone received the right to register his domain in the new zone. Following Russia, Cyrillic domains appeared in Ukraine (.UKR), Serbia (.SBR) and Kazakhstan (.KAZ).

In 2011, the increase of the domain zone was 34%, while the increase of .RU zone was only 15%. Now the domain zone is close to 800,000 domain names, whose age generally is one year (67.23% of total operating domains). In the first year of the zone’s existence, only 1.17% of all the domains were registered. According to the forecast by REG.RU registrar CEO, Alexei Korolyuk, the domain .RF will be able to reach an important mark of one million registrations already by the following birthday.