A national Internet domain name defines the address of the website and email address, and that is why it is an important aspect of the online identity of all those living and/or working in Serbia. National Internet domains offer numerous advantages to those registering them, a particularly important one being the treatment of national domains by Google and other search engines.
Serbia has two national Internet domains: .RS and .СРБ.
.RS is the Latin-script country-code top-level domain, (ccTLD for short), as designated by the international two-letter country code. It succeeded the former .YU domain.
The .RS domain became accessible on the Internet on 25th September 2007. Registrations of .RS domain names began on 10th March 2008, and as of 10th December 2018 it became possible to register domain names on the .RS domain containing an extended set of Latin letters from the alphabets of the Serbian, Albanian, Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, German, Hungarian, Montenegrin, Romanian, Roma, Slovak, Slovene and Vlach languages. In doing so the .RS domain became part of the Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) family, which comprises domains written in a script other than the English alphabet.
.СРБ is the Cyrillic country-code top-level domain, and is also part of the family of IDN domains. However it is also part of the group of domains in which names can use the local script to the right of the dot, i.e. in the domain extension.
After the Russian .РФ domain, .СРБ was the second Cyrillic Internet domain in the world and became visible on the Internet on 3rd May 2011. As of 27th January 2012, .RS domain registrants had six months’ priority registration rights for .СРБ domains at a special price, and on 1st August 2012 the .СРБ domain was opened up for unrestricted registrations. As of 5th March 2019 registrations under the .СРБ domain became possible for names containing the extended set of Cyrillic characters used in the scripts of the Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Rusyn and Vlach languages.
ICANN delegated both domains to the management of RNIDS, with the support of the relevant ministry of the Republic of Serbia. Domain registrations for end users (registrants) are carried out via RNIDS accredited registrars, while RNIDS, as the national registry, manages the register of national .RS and .СРБ domains, as well as the Internet infrastructure which ensures that they operate faultlessly and are fully available from any point on the Internet.
RNIDS manages five second-level domains within each of the two national top-level domains (.RS, CO.RS, ORG.RS, EDU.RS and IN.RS, as well as .СРБ, .ПР.СРБ, .ОРГ.СРБ, .ОБР.СРБ and .ОД.СРБ). The management of the second-level domains .AC.RS and .АК.СРБ has been delegated to the Academic Network of Serbia and the management of GOV.RS and .УПР.СРБ to the Serbian government’s Office for Information Technology and Electronic Governance.