In a dramatic new development to the familiar landscape of Internet domains, the launch of the new Russian national top level domain .РФ (.rf) has enabled users to register the first set of Cyrillic domain names in a striking move away from traditional Latin characters.

Russia has long been keen to pioneer the concept of a more authentic International Domain Name for its country, specially designed for its 45 million Internet users, to raise the importance of Russian as a global language.

According to the Russian Minister of Communications, Igor Shchegolev, "Russia is among the leaders of the world internet community. The use of Russian language domain names will become a new and significant phase in the development of the Russian internet segment."

More than 2 million .ru domain names have been registered to date and the new .РФ is expected to be even more popular as the number of domestic users continues to increase significantly. Russian is spoken worldwide from the Czech Republic to the United States via Latvia, Slovakia and Israel amongst other countries.

Excessive registration prices, expected to reach 10 million rubles ($347,500) per domain, were set for the first registration period in order to restrain cornering. This sunrise or grace period follows the launch of all new TLDs which allows businesses to protect trademarks by snapping up domain names at initially high asking prices. Companies and organisations must prove that the trademark is already owned and recognised by that country.

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers which runs the IP addresses and domain names we are all familiar with, remains a vital player in this new domains gold rush. Its newly shown openness to the expansion of IDNs means that we could soon see the Internet become even more global than before as local languages are used and whole sections of cyberspace opened up for specific international Internet communities.