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Russian is written in your local Cyrillic alphabet. For a community with a really long and proud history, having to write every online representation in a foreign script is clearly embarrassing. For awkward folks like these, the World Wide Web mechanism recently gained the ability to recognize and allow international scripts in URLs; and the government of Russia, is leading the charge to initiate the shift around the world, in directing local language scripts to use in basic URLs for each local Internet domain.

So can the ordinary Russian on the street delight in the prospect that the Russian experience on the Internet is much easier to use at this point that local Internet domains are written in Russian? Well this will depend on exactly where you dial. Yandex, Russia’s most popular Internet search engine, acknowledges that no more than one in ten Russians would appreciate being able to type their Internet domain addresses in Cyrillic. That may seem like a daunting level of support.

However, in case you think about what it must have been like to be a Red Russian for decades, living under a former KGB leader even now, you would probably understand. This is a nation that was forced by a one-party communist government to avoid the world and focus inward, for about fifty years. There was nothing about the rest of the world on television and in the newspapers that was not broadcast through the communist propaganda machine. The media is not entirely free there even today. But the global web is, and the men and women of Russia consider this independence a precious gift. Anything that the Russian administration proposes regarding the media fills people with strong suspicion. They feel that the government is simply suggesting this native language web domain business, to start some kind of way to attack the world wide web as well.

Russia has a population of almost 150 million; and only a fifth of them can use the World Wide Web. The other 80% live outside urban centers and have almost no direct exposure to English or have a conscious need for something other than Russian. There are over two million web domains registered with the Russian.ru suffix, and they might be interested in this for no reason other than to avoid the embarrassment of entering their proud.ru suffix in foreign English. The more they access the World Wide Web in their own language, the more it helps them use it as well.

Companies are opposed to this plan, which they believe will come into play in the middle of next year; They fear that web domain names in the local language will slow down the global web, make websites much more difficult to operate and run, and more difficult to protect from threats. There was even some dispute that having a Cyrillic script for a web domain name could make it harder to deal with Russian international crime, like the one that recently scammed Citibank in New York.

The whole world is watching Russia’s experience in implementing local scripting in web domain names; India, China, and other major nations with their own custom scripts, have experienced a long and breathless wait for this day, that they can put their own language in the forefront and not look west for a language script brochure. That day has come.

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