The Russian registry, the Coordination Center for TLD RU, has undertaken a rather unique way of promoting its ccTLD and internationalised ccTLD, .RU and .РФ respectively, to the public by sponsoring an expedition of two small flex-wing trikes, an expedition timed to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Valery Chkalov’s flight to the Far East. As of 4 August, the pilots had travelled over 6000 kilometres, making stops in many cities, including Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, and Chita raising awareness in the various Russian regions of the national domain space and promotion of the new Cyrillic domain, .РФ. “I am flattered to note that we stir interest in almost every place where we stop. We were interviewed in the city of Irkutsk, and in the village of Khorinsk we are very popular with the locals: everyone is curious to know of our route and our flying machines. Everybody knows AN-2 or helicopters; however, people are unfamiliar with an exotic small flex-wing trike,” wrote Alexander Scherbakov in the crew’s blog. En route, the pilots are engaged in educational activities related not only to the small aircrafts but also for the sponsors to the logos on the ultralight trikes’ wings. To register your .RU or .РФ domain, check out Europe Registry here .

The .РФ internationalised top level domain, the Russian Cyrillic IDN, rocketed past 800,000 active registrations on 4 April 2011, less than five months after it became available for general registration. At the time registration became open to all, there were 18,391 domains registered, and then in its first month, starting 11 November 2010, there were another 596,294 domain names registered. Since then monthly registration figures have dropped dramatically with 85,742 domains registered in month two, then 35,872, 31,824 and 28,686 registrations in subsequent months.

[unable to retrieve full-text content] ПРЕЗИДЕНТ.РФ was selected the 2010 Google Trend Award for category Site of the Year .This category was presented for the first time in Google Trend .

The recent launch of Russia’s Cyrillic top level domain, where over 600,000 domain names have been registered in less than three weeks since its launch, has been touched by scandal.

11|25|2010 4:04 pm EDT Cyrillic ccTLD Launch Overshadowed by Legal Dispute by Frank Michlick in Categories: Legal Issues – 6 Comments As reported earlier the Cyrillic .РФ IDN ccTLD launch had reached a stunning number of 500,000 registrations in the first week. Considering the numbers, it was obvious that speculators were playing the TLD, but apparently six registrars are involved in registering many of the names for resale & auction and are now involved in a legal dispute as reported by TheMoscowNews . Many of the registered names have been frozen by the registry

The relaunch of .CO has proved to be a resounding success to date with the registry announcing they have passed the 600,000 active registrations mark as of 24 November. The relaunch of .CO, the ccTLD for Colombia, took place earlier this year and it has been four months since registrations were available to the general public.

It took close to two months for .CO to reach the significant half million active registrations when it became available for general registration following its relaunch in July of this year, but it only took eight days for the Russian Cyrillic domain .РФ (.RF – Russian Federation or Российская Федерация in Cyrillic) to pass the same mark.