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MEDVEDEV GETS WISH FOR .рф DOMAIN

MOSCOW — The world’s governing body for Internet domain names voted Friday to allow the use of non-Latin characters, clearing the way for the .рф suffix and web sites named in Cyrillic.

The first step in a long effort to make the Internet less reliant on the Latin alphabet allows “nations and territories to apply for Internet extensions … made up of characters from their national language,” the not-for-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, said in a statement following a weeklong summit in Seoul, South Korea.

President Dmitry Medvedev — who has his own video blog and claims to be conversant in Russian web slang, known as Olbanian — made acquiring Cyrillic web addresses an early priority of his administration.

But commercial web site operators in Russia shrugged off the changes, saying they would provide more flexibility but were unlikely to attract masses of new users.

“This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and a historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet,” Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s president and CEO, said in the statement. “We just made the Internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.”

ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush called it “the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago.”

The U.S. Commerce Department opened the U.S.-based ICANN to broader international oversight on Sept. 30, after years of criticism that Washington had a stranglehold on Internet regulation.

Russia will submit its .рф application Nov. 16, the first day ICANN starts accepting them, said Andrei Kolesnikov, president of the Coordination Center for ...

FEDERAL MIGRATION SERVICE BUSTS ANTI-RACISM MARCHERS

The March Against Hatred, an annual rally against neo-Nazi and racist violence held on Saturday, was raided by the Federal Migration Service. Officers started to single out participants of African descent and check their residency permits as the demonstration reached Ploshchad Sakharova, where the platform for the speakers had been installed.

Ella Polyakova, ...