Dmitry Medvedev the President of Russia has stated “We must do everything we can to make sure that we achieve in the future a Cyrillic Internet domain name,” Mr Medvedev told the International Congress of Russian Press in Moscow. “It is a pretty serious thing. With the development of the IDN’s the Cyrillic Internet domain name will be explored by ICANN.

ICANN, the body which oversees internet addresses, is currently trialling a system which would allow domain names to be written in 15 languages – including Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Japanese – but has given no guidance on when it will be implemented.

Russian is the sixth most widely spoken language in the world after Mandarin, English, Hindi/Urdu, Arabic and Spanish. According to the Dictionary of Languages, there are an estimated 175 million people who speak it, mainly in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, and other former Soviet states.

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