Supervising Council of the Foundation for Internet Development decided to cancel restrictions on registration of domains with xn-- prefix in SU domain starting from April 28, 2008.

For the last several years International corporation ICANN implements the system of multilingual domains (IDN) that permits using domain names with symbols of different national alphabets. Considering support for multiple languages one of key features of contemporary Internet representatives of ICANN, UNESCO and International Telecommunication Union (ITU) at the Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro in November 2007 decided to join their efforts on IDN implementation. World Internet community actively supports this position.

However until now possibility of using only national language characters in the domain names is not implemented in full. Even in those domain zones where multilingual domains are supported users have to write higher level domain names using ASCII code. Internal names in the DNS systems used for addressing always consist only of ASCII characters. Thus in fact only domains consisting of ASCII symbols are currently used for Internet addressing.

Some registries implemented (or are implementing) technology of registering domain names beginning with xn-- prefix that makes it possible for users to enter part of the domain name in a Web browser using national language.

Plug-in embedded in a browser permits to decode presentation of the domain name in a national language into ASCII-based domain with xn-- prefix that is used for a regular DNS query. A user or service provider can either design software used for decoding and decoding algorithm on his own or use PUNYCODE algorithm recommended by ICANN and published in RFC documents.

September 2007 at the press conference in ITAR-TASS dedicated to 17th anniversary of SU domain initiative of the Foundation for Internet Development to cancel restrictions on registration of domain names with xn-- prefix was announced.

By the decision of the Supervising Council of the Foundation for Internet Development effective April 28, 2008 restrictions on registration of domains with xn-- prefix in SU domain were removed. This makes it possible to enter part of address in a Web browser using national code page symbols.

In the process of generation of domain names with xn-- prefix using encoding algorithms mentioned in RFC documents registrators are not allowed to mix symbols of different national alphabets.