Runet Day Date in the current year: April 7, 2024

The term “Runet” was introduced in 1997 by Raffi Aslanbekov, a Russian-language blogger born in Azerbaijan and based in Israel. It quickly became popular among Russian-speaking Internet users. In 2001, the word “Runet” was included in the Russian Academy of Sciences Spelling Dictionary with the definition “Russian Internet”.

The term is a portmanteau of ru (Russia’s ccTLD and code for the Russian language) and net for Internet/network. There is no consensus on the definition of the term; at least four definitions of Runet exist, and some of them include websites that others exclude.

The most common meaning of the term “Runet” is Russian-language Internet. Geographically, it reaches all continents, but most Runet users are based in post-Soviet states or belong to their diasporas.

Another definition describes Runet as all websites in the top-level domains .ru and .рф. It excludes a significant number of Russian-language and/or Russian-based websites that use other domains, such as .com, .net, .me, .su, .kz, .by, .ua, and others.

In a 2009 report published by Yandex, Russia’s leading provider of Internet-related services and products, defined Runet as websites in any language (predominantly in Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Kazakh) published in the national domains of the original CIS states (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan) or the top-level domain of the Soviet Union (.su). However, this definition of Runet is the least popular.

Finally, some definitions describe Runet as the Internet in the Russian Federation, i. e. Internet infrastructure subject to Russian law. This definition is strongly supported by the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor), and government officials of the Russian Federation. However, this definition is not supported by the majority of the Russian online community.

Most ordinary users perceive Runet as all websites, the content of which is available to Russian-speaking users without translation, including both exclusively Russian-language websites and websites that have a Russian-language version. Because of this multitude of definitions, it is hard to say how many websites Runet consists of or how many Runet users there are.

Be that as it may, Runet Day commemorates the introduction of the top-level domain .ru on April 7, 1994. The Cyrillic ccTLD for Russia, .рф, was first presented in 2009 and became operational on May 13, 2010. As of January 2022, there were over 5.3 million domain names in the domain .ru (including its second-level domains) and over 900,000 domain names in the domain .рф. The current official administrator of the ccTLDs .ru and .рф is the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ.