Author: Veni Markovski

Will there really be a new Russian Internet?

There have been some reports in the past few days about possible “division” of the Internet in Russia, tied in with speculation that the forthcoming Cyrillic domain names will be used to grant the Russian government more control over its citizens. The source of this speculation appears to be an article published in UK newspaper The Guardian. That article was then reproduced in a number of Russian news articles, most of them quoting a direct translation published by SecurityLab.

There was another article, also published by several Russian sources and based on a press-conference given by the Russian country-code top-level domain administration (.ru ccTLDA). Right now ICANN is running tests on TLDs, including one in Russian – http://пример.испытание – and the article made clear that the desire of the Russian Internet community would be, if the tests are successful, to have a new IDN – .РФ (from Russian Federation, in Cyrillic).

Continue reading