Russia is the first country allowed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to register Cyrillic domain names, with the label .рф, apart from the already existing Latin string .ru.
The process of registering the Russian Cyrillic domain .рф commenced on November 11th at noon, according to the Moscow time. The interest of users to register the second Russian domain is unchanged.
The commencement of the registration process attracted a large number of Internet users in Russia and over 100,000 domains were registered during the first three hours. A total of 258,000 .рф domain names were registered by the end of the first registration day.
By the end of November 14th, 408,959 Cyrillic .рф domain names were registered. During this short period of three and a half days, the new Russian domain entered the list of the twenty largest European domains.