Runet

For other uses, see Runet (disambiguation).

Runet (Russian: Рунет), a portmanteau of ru (both code for the Russian language and Russia's top-level domain) and net/network, refers to Russian-language community on the Internet and websites. The term Runet was coined in Israel in the spring of 1997 by Israeli resident originally from Baku, Azerbaijan[1] blogger Raffi Aslanbekov (Russian: Раффи Асланбеков[2]) and Russian-language aka Great Uncle, an author of the online column Great Uncle's Thoughts.[3][4] Runet was popularized by early Internet users and was included in several dictionaries, including Spelling dictionary of Russian Academy of Sciences, edited by V. V. Lopatin in 2001.

For ordinary users the term Runet means that content of websites is available for Russian users without foreign language skills or online shops have their offices at least in Russia (for example, Russian search engines, e-mail services, anti-viruses, dictionaries, Russian-language clones of Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, eBay, PayPal, Foursquare, etc. for usage in all post-Soviet states), so the term is related to practical usage for end users. Therefore, many local IT-companies are successful and more useful than foreign services on the Russian market. The term can describe the situation of the 1990s to the early 2000s. Foreign companies didn't want to operate in the Russian market and localize their products and Russia-based start-ups were closer to users in Russia and automatically for Russophone users outside Russia. Nowadays, some Russian users are not interested in usage of such services as Facebook or Google Maps because local services have more Russia-specific features and local community (VK.com, Yandex services, etc.), though many international websites have very high quality Russian localization and Google search has had full support of Russian morphology for about 10 years. These situations are more or less applicable to most of post-Soviet states and these states are using the Internet in Russian language and forming a common lingua franca community like English on the Internet.

The term has been used by media, journalists and politicians in several senses. Runet is not completely synonymous with the Internet in Russia nor Internet sites in Russian, nor even with the set of sites in the .ru TLD, but more accurately refers to the sphere of Internet sites predominantly visited by Russian-speaking users, which form a part of contemporary Russian culture. The word "Runet" is short and useful for journalists, who can write just "PayPal will operate in Runet" instead of the full title. Many officials of Russian government actively use this term as a synonym for Internet in the territory of Russia, i.e. for Internet infrastructure, which is subject of Russian law (including Russian censorship laws, copyright, corporate, advertisement laws, etc.), but the Russian online community doesn't support this use of the term and dozens of millions of users use Russian language on the Internet outside Russia in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Latvia, Israel, Germany, the UK, the USA, etc. Some Russian officials automatically believe that Russian Wikipedia is based in Russia as a business entity and try to control the content of the website or establish a Russia-based clone of Wikipedia.[5][6][7]

The country domain .ru in Russian phonology does not sound like the first syllable of the country's name, since "Russia" in Russian is called "Rossiya", with an O. The pronunciation of the word Runet is closer to the pronunciation of "Russian language" - russky yazyk [u] instead of Rossiya [о].

Historical overview

Historically the term Runet has been described in several ways.

Research

Harvard University's Berkman Center conducts regular researches of Internet in Russia,[15] and, in particular, has papers named "Mapping RuNet Politics and Mobilization"[16] and "RuNet Echo".[17] The prominent Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) regular Internet measurements are titled Runet.fom.ru.[18]

References

External links

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