Russia marking Internet Day

The date is not an officially registered professional or public event yet and it is largely the product of a public initiative, which quite well falls in line with the Internet's highly democratic spirit.

It is believed that the Internet was incepted in 1969 in the U.S. where a computer network was designed for a reliable transmission of data during a nuclear war.

From that time on, the Internet has been developing quite successfully and it covers more than a quarter of the entire humankind today.

The first Soviet/Russian domain name - SU - was registered in 1990, and on April 4, 1994, Russia's national domain RU went into effect.

This coming winter, the Russian community of web users expects the arrival of the national Cyrillic domain RF.

The Ministry of Telecommunications says that 47 million Russians used Internet at the beginning of 2009. Forecasts indicate the figure may go up by a third in the next twelve months.

In March 2009, a two-millionth website with the "ru" domain name was registered.

The volume of Russia's e-market totaled 1.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2008 and e-commerce stood at around 2.5 billion dollars. Although the figures are not bad, they stand far behind the global standards that show hundreds of billions of dollars; Kazinform cites Itar-Tass. See www.itar-tass.ru for full version.