As of January 27th website owners in Serbia and the Diaspora can register the Cyrillic domain .СРБ as well. During the first six months, only the owners of existing or newly registered .RS domain names will be eligible to register .СРБ domain names at a special price. After this period, anyone will be able to register Cyrillic domain names, regardless of whether they have a specific .RS domain name or not.
Internet users should know that they need not enter "www" in front of the Cyrillic URL. That is the remnant of the original practice in writing URLs because all existing sites with Latin domain names function without "www" if servers where they are placed are properly set. The Cyrillic Internet domain .СРБ is a new, second country code Top Level Domain of the Republic of Serbia, which means that in the future it will be equally used as the existing .RS ccTLD. From a practical viewpoint, the same website will be visible at both addresses, .СРБ and .RS, if that is what its owner wants and if the server is set that way.
After the Russian Cyrillic domain .РФ, our .СРБ is the second Internet domain in the Cyrillic script in the world that users can register. It belongs to the family of Internationalized Domain Names, IDNs, i.e. domain names which are not written in English alphabet. The largest countries and nations in the world, Russia and China, already have IDNs in their national scripts, as well as many Arab and Far East countries.
The country code Top Level Domain marks territorial belonging and is thus highly significant for the purpose of defining the Internet identity of everyone living and working in Serbia. Thanks to the peculiarity of the Serbian Cyrillic where one phoneme matches one letter, addresses under the .СРБ domain will unequivocally be pronounced exactly as they are written, unlike (for instance) numerous domain names in the English alphabet. For this reason, the slogan of the campaign for the popularisation of using the .СРБ domain is "Link as you speak!"
The Serbian National Internet Domain Registry (RNIDS) has organised a press-conference at the Home of Serbian Internet Domains apropos the commencement of the .СРБ domain registration. Ms Jasna Matić, State Secretary for Digital Agenda, is convinced that the Cyrillic script is a significant element of our identity and that it is important to preserve the possibility of its use on the Internet as well. Institutions, which have been among the first ones to register the Cyrillic domain, are: President of the Republic - председник.срб, Government of Serbia - влада.срб, Digital Agenda - дигиталнаагенда.упр.срб, City of Belgrade - београд.срб and National Broadcasting Service - ртс.срб. Ms Jasna Matić has expressed her hope that other institutions, following their example, will register and use the Cyrillic domain. Ms Mirjana Tasić, Strategy and Development Advisor at RNIDS, has presented the process which brought us where we are now, i.e. to the commencement of the .СРБ domain registration. She did not forget to mention crucial decisions and dates in the past two years, nor technical and organisational conditions we had had to fulfil so that the new ccTLD could become visible online. Linguist Vlado Đukanović, MA, believes that Cyrillic will bring back all letters of our alphabet to the “Serbian part of the Internet” because 21 letters of international Latin script should not do for those wanting to write in Serbian.
The .СРБ domain registration for end users (registrants) is done through registrars (most often being Internet providers) who have authorisation from RNIDS.