First results of sunrise period in domains .moscow and .москва became public. During this phase trademark owners added to the international database of Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH) can register domain names that coincide with their brand names. The number of registration in domain .moscow is rather low – 154 names. However, it is an average number for a new gTLD during sunrise period. In the end of May, according to data of sunrise periods in 101 new gTLDs, average number of registered name was 144,2.
More surprising is that there were only 7 names registered in .москва domain. Representative of FAITID (registry for both gTLDs) Sergey Gorbunov explains that Latin-script names are leading because owners of trademarks written in Cyrillic script are not familiar with Trademark Clearinghouse. According to him, there are only 127 Cyrillic strings in the TMCH database. Interestingly enough, Apple was the biggest registrant in both domains of the capital, it registered 11 names in .moscow zone.
Marina Nikerova, senior deputy director at Technical Center of Internet, believes that almost 160 domains registered during sunrise period is a very good result. “During sunrise period only trademark owners that are enrolled on the list of the international Trademark Clearinghouse of ICANN can apply to register a new domain. The procedure of enrolling requires quite a lot of work from trademark owners. This explains why large international corporations bought the majority of domains in the Latin-script zone – usually they make sure in advance to get enrolled on the list of Trademark Clearinghouse, because they expect to buy names in a big number of zones at once. In contrast, local companies (including Russian ones, that will be true users of the .москва domain), probably, decided to wait for the next period. A true success of the zone can be evaluated after the General Availability period is opened and after that, when the time comes to renew registration of the names”, said she.
