‘This year will probably be remembered for the introduction of Cyrillic domains. This is a huge and complex challenge, yet it is also a very promising prospect,’ RU-CENTER’s analyst Pavel Khromtsov announced during an online marathon in Yekaterinburg.

‘There are two ways to look at the issue: the conservative one and the progressive one. The conventionalists believe everything is good enough as it is, while changes might make things more complicated. The progressive thinkers feel there are certain groups of people who don’t think they need to speak or read English. At the same time, these groups of people do need to use the Internet,’ Khromtsov said.

‘At the moment, these are Russia, Greece, and Bulgaria that would quite like to have Cyrillic domains introduced. According to the most realistic expectations, ‘.рф’ domains will only appear in Russia at the end of 2009. However, no technical problems are very likely. There is only one nuance related to indexing of Cyrillic domains by search engines. Google is prepared to get them indexed, whereas Yandex and Rambler are not, at the moment,’ he added.