IMO it won't make a big difference. It's like giving vitamins to somebody that is in a coma. Ditto for .eu.
All in all, this move is just another part of the massive launch that will begin in the fall for idn.idn. Russian idn.idn has been cueing up for almost a year to begin sunrise this fall and all the press and interest really sent Russian idn.com traffic spiking. The idn.idn process and testing has been over 10 years in the making... but
finally ready for launch in dozens of international languages.
http://www.kommersant.ru/doc.aspx?DocsID=1192908&NodesID=7
Auto translation:
Minkomsvyazi June 25, reported that Russia presented the international community to plan for the introduction of Cyrillic domain top level domain .ÑÑ. The presentation of Russia were introduced in Sydney, The International Conference ICANN (Internet Corporation for management of domain names and numeric series). According to the Deputy Minister of Communications and Mass Communications of Russia Alexei Soldatov, the country is "organizationally and technically ready to receive Cyrillic root domain".
As noted by Soldatov, "participants in the process of formulation of global rules and standards were pleasantly surprised that the Russian Internet community, and Coordination Center had done so much to have Russia organizationally and technically ready to receive Cyrillic root domain". In November 2008 the first President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev expressed his full endorsement of the idea of introducing a national domain. END QUOTE
From April 22, 2009:
The Director of the national domain coordination center said at the opening of the Moscow conference (
http://ok2009.ru/ ) today that:
.ÑÑ (translation= .RF for Russian Federation) should begin it's registration period on Sept 09 for govt, tm holders and other right holders, and on March 10, 2010 for public registration. Only Russian passport holders may apply.
http://www.rian.ru/science/20090422/168948405.html
http://www.rian.ru/science/20090422/168947031.html
STARTING AT ONLY $31,000...
According to the announcement below, the registration (after the sunrise period) for âregularâ folks will take a form of a Dutch auction, where the initial price will be 1 million rubles, which is around $31K. (Speculation is that this number will drop hugely once the cherry picking is over).
http://www.webnames.ru/scripts/news.pl