MOSCOW, April 7 (RIA Novosti), Daria Chernyshova – In Russia the Internet is a critical component of the nation’s infrastructure that keeps people together, according to Andrey Kolesnikov, the CEO of the company that manages Russian domain names.
“The Internet in Russia is more than just a service, due to its geography and the national tradition to remain where you live, the Internet is a critical national infrastructure keeping people together,” said Andrey Kolesnikov, CEO of the Coordination Center for Top-Level Domains, a regulator of the country’s system of website naming.
“Geographically, Russia is a hugely expansive country. And the core of this infrastructure is the Russian language. The Internet allows the free flow of ideas, money, materials and digital entertainment,” he told RIA Novosti.
Runet, the Russian segment of the World Wide Web, is celebrating its 20th anniversary on Monday. Runet ranks first in Europe in terms of number of users, and .ru domain names are the sixth largest in terms of the number of registered websites.
Runet is comparable to networks in Europe, but for users it costs less money to access and operates at higher speed, Kolesnikov said.
“Nowadays Russia has the number one position in terms of users and soon Runet will become the largest digital economy in Europe. Further growth remains in front of us and it makes Runet very attractive for investors,” he added.
In 2010, Russia launched a system to allow website URLs in the Cyrillic alphabet. The websites end in the Cyrillic equivalent for .RF, the abbreviation for the Russian Federation.
The new names have taken off, and the system has been the leading internationalized (non-Latin) domain name category over the past four years. To date, over 820,000 domain names in Cyrillic have been registered.
“We expect the appearance of email for internationalized domains will give even more impetus to its development,” Kolesnikov told RIA Novosti.
Russia has also given birth to a number of large Internet companies, including Yandex, which runs the most popular search engine in Russia.
“There are two countries in the world where local search engines based on national languages dominate local markets: Russia and China,” Kolesnikov noted, commenting on Yandex’s fast development in Russia and the CIS.
The Russian segment of the World Wide Web is also a specific market. “Runet differs from other segments of the Internet,” Grigory Bakunov, Chief of Development at Yandex told RIA Novosti. “First, lots of people do not speak English, which is an obstacle for global companies coming to the Russian market,” he said.
Second feature of the Runet, according to Bakunov, is that the Russian users are unwilling to use bank cards for online payments, which makes local players implement additional means of payment. And third, the creators of services have to adapt not only to the global, but also to the local infrastructural leaders such as VKontakte and Facebook, Yandex and Google.
“As weird as it may sound, all these hinders contribute to the fact that Runet develops much faster than the global Internet,” Bakunov concluded.
Twenty years ago the Internet's Network Information Center registered the official top-level domain of the Russian Federation: .RU.
The number of Internet users has been growing ever since, and Russian is now one of the most used languages on the World Wide Web.
