There are currently around 40 million Internet users in Russia and some two million country-specific domain names, the Russian Network Information Center said.
"In such a short period, the Internet has gone from an exclusive toy into a phenomenon which has embraced the whole world and is available to every third citizen in the country," said Mark Tverdynin, who chairs the regional public center for Internet technology.
In the last few years, the number of Russian Internet users has grown significantly. In 2004 according to a survey by Global Reach, there were just 22 million Russians using the Internet, while in 2008, RNIC said the number had grown to 34 million people.
Russia plans to launch a national domain name .rf - Russian Federation - written in the Cyrillic script instead of Latin. The domain is aimed at raising the importance of Russian as a global language.
Russian is also the ninth most popular language among Internet users with 38 million people according to data available from the Internet World Stats site.
In November 2008, .rf was approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers following a request by President Dmitry Medvedev. The registration process could start by summer 2009.
