Who is scared of Russian?

Dear Sir:

In his article 'Russians Wary of Cyrillic Web Domains' of Dec. 22, Mr. Levy quoted my words through the text, and I am compelled to comment on some arguments he refers to.

The article fails to adequately address the recent fundamental developments of the Internet.

Firstly, conceptually, the process of launching the internationalized (native-language) top-level domains (TLD) is taking place not only in Russia, but in Arab countries, China, Japan, South Korea, Greece, India and other non-Latin alphabets nations. The process is not directly related to the nature of a country’s political system, but is consonant with the general aspiration to a greater diversity.

Secondly, technologically, the idea of using TLD for controlling the Internet is preposterous. There are sophisticated and powerful technical means to bowdlerize the Net, none of them based upon TLD. As for cyber-ghetto formed by a Cyrillic or other TLD, this concept appears equally preposterous. The dilemma is simple: either you have the free Internet, or not, and cyber-ghetto suggests the latter, thus making censorship and content filtering useless, as there would be nothing to censor.

Thirdly, commercially, whether Russians prefer the Cyrillic TLD over the Latin .RU is hard to predict, but one thing is certain: consumers will have broader choice, which by itself is the rejection of the concept of a “totalitarian Net”, where there is no choice at all.

Finally, with the Affirmation of Commitments and ICANN’s giving green light to non-Latin TLDs , including Russia’s, we thought the move was going to open a new page in the Internet development worldwide, including the USA. But, it seems to me, some individuals still nurture their Cold War-era sentiments towards Russia. What’s worse, they seem to have no adequate understanding of the Internet, how it is governed and operates to offer any credible guidance to the public at large.

Respectfully,

Andrei Kolesnikov

Director

Coordination Center for Russia’s Top Level Domain .RU