Russia has now opened its first non-ASCII country code domain, .PO (no that's not a typo - the second letter should actually be crossed - but my blog doesn't want to do IDNs it would seem...) which translates to .RF for Russian Federation. According to Andrei Kolesnikov, a director at the Russian registry, 36,607 new domains were registered in the first hour, 43,054 in the second and 41,456 in the third hour. Those new domains came on top of the 18,000 plus that had already been registered as part of the pre-launch sunrise period giving priority access to trademark and rights holders.

"This clearly demonstrates a great demand for domains in national languages," Kolesnikov said.

As the time of writing, there are now over 226,000 domains registered in the Cyrillic Russia domain.