The Russian government is looking to create a Cyrillic internet, but is it just another case of Big Brother controlling its citizens?

The Guardian recently published a story on Russia’s desire “for greater control over the Russian-language part of the net – and its aim seems to be to create a web that operates in Cyrillic, completely independent from the wider web.” However, The Guardian notes the “problem for Russia is that its top-level domain – with the ASCII suffix .ru – translates into Cyrillic as .py, the domain name of Paraguay.” This could lead to security problems for Russia’s internet users. So, according to ICANN’s Kim Davies, Russia is “is pushing for .rf in Cyrillic.”

Issues addressed in the article are:

• the option where every Russian domain name holder would have to register a domain name using the .rf top level domain in Cyrillic meaning Russia would have their own root and making it much easier to control the TLD than hundreds of thousands of secondary level domains
• the loss of global operability on the internet and isolation from the rest of the world
• the possibility of China following a similar route, and what it would mean.

To read the entire story in The Guardian, see www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/03/internet.censorship