Russia’s government is pushing for greater control over the Russian-language part of the net - and its aim seems to be to create a web that operates in Cyrillic, completely independent from the wider web. The Guardian reports.

The problem for Russia is that its top-level domain - with the ASCII suffix .ru - translates into Cyrillic as .py, the domain name of Paraguay. Russia has a second top level domain name of .ru in Ascii code, but is pushing for .rf in Cyrillic.”

… The key is whether Russian international domain names would use their own root servers - which decide where to route your internet requests - independent of the existing internet root servers which are mainly based in the US.

Wolfgang Kleinwachter, special adviser to the chairman of the Internet Governance Forum, thinks that the worst-case scenario would mean everyone would have to register a domain name using the .rf top level domain in Cyrillic. “Then [Russia] would have their own root and it’s much easier to control the top-level domain than hundreds of thousands of secondary level domains.”

Russia’s government is pushing for greater control over the Russian-language part of the net - and its aim seems to be to create a web that operates in Cyrillic, completely independent from the wider web. The Guardian reports.
The problem for Russia is that its top-level domain - with the ASCII suffix .ru - translates into [...]