The registration of Cyrillic Internet .СРБ domain names started on January 27th 2012, resulting in more than 6,800 domain names of this type that have been registered in the course of one year. Since there are currently over 77,000 .RS domain names, the above number shows that the .СРБ domain managed to reach almost 10% of what its "older brother" had achieved. Considering the insufficient use of the Cyrillic alphabet in our society, this represents quite a satisfactory result.
The decision of the Serbian National Internet Domain Registry (RNIDS) to introduce a Cyrillic national Internet domain actually represented a realization of the constitutional right of the citizens of Serbia to use the official alphabet for their Internet domain names. Showing due respect to their national alphabets, 23 countries have already reached the same decision; all the largest countries in the world that do not use the Latin alphabet happen to be among them (Russia, China and India), as well as many Arab and Asian ones. As some of these countries officially use several languages and alphabets, there are currently 33 domains with internationalized names (Internationalized Domain Name - IDN), i.e. domain names written using other than the English alphabet.
Our .СРБ domain has one specific advantage – it is the only Internet domain in the world that allows website addresses to be written exactly the way they are pronounced. Thanks to the characteristic of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet where each phoneme has its own letter-counterpart, the.СРБ domain name addresses – as opposed to the multitude of domain names written in the English alphabet – are unequivocally pronounced exactly the way they are written. Free registration of.СРБ domain names began on August 1st 2012; from that day on, anyone living in Serbia or abroad was able to register their first and last names, family names or nicknames, names of their organizations or companies, or any other terms that reminded them of Serbia or tied them to it as their Cyrillic Internet domain names, with letters “.СРБ“ at the end of the address.
Certain technical issues that were present at the time when .СРБ domain names were introduced have now been eliminated. At the request of RNIDS, for example, Internet browser Firefox provided a correct presentation of Cyrillic .СРБ domain names and officially announced that it had corrected the bug in their program.
More information on .СРБ domain names: њњњ.срб (in Serbian only)
More information on IDNs: www.icann.org/en/resources/idn