The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved the first non-Latin ccTLDs on April 27th 2010. Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia and The United Arab Emirates (UAE) were then approved to use ccTLDs written in their own scripts.
Russia became the first country provided with the possibility of registering domain names in Cyrillic, with the label “.рф”, apart from the existing Latin string “.ru”.
The process of registering “.рф” domains commenced on November 11th 2010 at noon, according to Moscow time. This attracted a large number of Internet users in Russia. During the first hour of the registration, 36,607 new domains were registered, 43,054 Cyrillic domains were registered during the second hour, and 41,456 during the third hour. Before the process of registering the second national domain commenced, more than 18,000 users got the priority right for registering the Cyrillic domain ".рф” in order to protect their brands.
A considerable interest of users for registering the Russian Cyrillic domain justifies the decision of ICANN to carry out IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process and enable domains to be registered in national scripts.