.рус

Status:	Proposed
Language:	Russian
Translates to:	"rus"(sian)
Type:	IDN gTLD
Category:	Culture
Community:	Yes
Priority #:	56
More information:

.рус is an IDN gTLD being proposed in ICANN's New gTLD Program. The applicant is Rusnames Limited. The TLD is intended to create a space on the Internet for an ethnic community of Russian-speaking people who originated in Kiev Rús in the 13th century. This includes but is not limited to residents of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Norway, Russia, Ukraine and the United States.

Application Details

Excerpted from response to application #18 in TLD application:

"The term ʺRussianʺ as used by an English speaker is intended to mean something related generically to one of three different things interchangeably - (1) country Russia or (2) Russian peoples or language (3) Russian culture. This is not technically accurate since the term .РУС - ʺRussianʺ when used by Cyrillic language speaker means something related to the ancient people called the ʺKievan Rus’ʺ and their culture centered (1000+ years ago) around modern day Kiev in Ukraine. The Cyrillic⁄Russian language term for these people (from whom modern day Russians and others descended from), the Kievan Rus’, is “Киевская РУСь” – in Russian Cyrillic characters. Note that the ʺРУСьʺ portion corresponds to ʺRusʺ or the Russian heritage. Thus within the Russian Cyrillic language, the term РУС is often embedded in compound words as an adjective to describe Russian heritage - for example as in the word for ʺRussian Languageʺ or ʺRussian Riverʺ (“РУСский языкʺ and ʺРУСская река” respectively). Thus while РУС allows a connection to 2 of the 3 items listed above - namely, Russian people or Russian culture\language - it categorically does not refer to any connection to item (1), the country of ʺRussiaʺ, which is written in Russian Cyrillic as (“РОсия” – spells like “ROSSIYA”) with the term ROS (“РОС”) referring to the name of the country. Thus while the term РУС may appear to a casual English speaker (or any non-Russian or non-Cyrillic speaker⁄user for that matter) to be translated into English as ʺRusʺ and therefore be somehow an acronym for the country Russia, this is definitely not so to native Russian speakers or the Russian community. For a Russian speaker, the term ROS (“РОС”) has to be present to suggest any connection to the country Russia. It is not interchangeable as in the unfortunate English translation where it could also incorrectly refer to name of the state.

For its intended target users and in its target script .РУС gTLD seeks to unite citizens of myriad nations through a historically, linguistically and ethnically connected Cyrillic Rus community dating back to the 9th century AD. The proposed gTLD is, in fact, the Cyrillic equivalent of the English word Rus, symbolizing a people who migrated from the Baltic region of Europe to Kiev, where they founded a dynasty that spread to what is today Belarus, Ukraine and the European portion of Russia. While the .РУС gTLD ties back linguistically to the Rus people, it also has the potential to tie together the diasporas of tens of millions of people across the globe who read Cyrillic-script languages, all of which evolved from the Cyrillic adopted and spread by the Kievan Rus.

[..]

The .РУС gTLD community is global; peoples of various nations united through their historical, ethnic and linguistic connections which date back more than a millennium. The Rus communityʹs earliest recorded origin is that of a Germanic tribe in the 800s. Rus, the English language translation of the Russian Cyrillic word for both the Kievan Rus people and their Russian Cyrillic Language, migrated from the Baltic region of what is now Sweden to eastern Europe in the 9th Century, eventually establishing a dynasty headquartered in Kiev, located in the heart of modern day Ukraine. The Kievan Rus state covered what is today Belarus, Ukraine and the European portion of Russia, and evolved over the centuries into the several nations that have Russian as an official language today, including Belarus, Ukraine, and others. These nations also have a 20 million strong diaspora of linguistically or culturally Russian people living in hundreds of countries around the world. But the .РУС community connects not merely through ethnic ties to the Rus people but also to an alphabet, born in the 9th Century and adopted and spread by the Kievan Rus, known eventually as Cyrillic. The Christian Saint Cyril (known prior to becoming a monk by the name Constantine) is believed to have spurred development of the precursor of the modern Cyrillic alphabet. The development of a written form of Eastern European speech, the Glagolitic alphabet--derived from the ancient Greek alphabet with new symbols to capture sounds not found in ancient Greece--allowed Cyril and other missionaries to convert the Orthodox Bible in a form that could be read and understood by peoples of Eastern Europe. The evolved form of that alphabet that arose in the 11th Century, Cyrillic, is named after Cyril. Cyrillic is commonly associated with the Russian language, and Russia contains the largest population of Cyrillic Language speakers. But the alphabet is used in other Slavic languages such as Bulgarian, Belarusian, Macedonian, Serbian, and Ukrainian. The Cyrillic alphabet has spread beyond Slavic languages, in tongues scattered across the globe, from Asia to Europe to North America. Some of those languages are Abkhaz, Bashkir, Aleut, Erzya, Kazakh, Kildin Sami, Komi, Kyrgyz, Mari, Moksha, Mongolian, Ossetic, Romani, Sakha, Tajik, Tatar, Tlingit, Tuvan, Udmurt, Yakut, Yuit, and Yupik. The .РУС gTLD will allow these disparate but related peoples--connected through ethnicity and linguistics--to unite online as a full and robust community, enjoying the connection and exchange of information empowered by speakers of other languages, primarily English, on the Internet. The community is further defined in the subheads below. Descriptions should include:

[..]

RusNames operates in the heart of the community as defined both by geography and population. But as this application demonstrates, it has a clear understanding of the larger community that would be served by .РУС, the spread over more than a millennia of the Rus people and the Cyrillic alphabet.

[..]

The .РУС TLD will be open to anyone complying with RusNames Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) and with ICANN guidelines. In that sense it will be treated as a gTLD such as .COM, while clearly intended for and focused on the community described above.

However, as mentioned above, the primary goal of the .РУС gTLD is the protection and promulgation of Russian Cyrillic culture, language and heritage. To this end, whilst registrations within the .РУС namespace will be theoretically open to anyone, RusNames will require that websites seeking to do so have; 1) The majority of their content in the Russian Cyrillic Language 2) This content must respect the Russian Cyrillic Language, Culture and History"

Top-Level Domain