The Coordination Center for TLD .RU announces that the application for the new Cyrillic domain .РФ has successfully passed Fast Track procedure and the ICANN has approved the application.
As a reminder, the IDN ccTLD Fast Track procedure was approved by the ICANN quite recently – on 30 October 2009. First applications for delegation of IDN domains in line with this procedure could be submitted since 16 November 2009. Russia submitted its application within the first several hours after the opening. This is the first application in Cyrillic script to date
When processing the application, the ICANN ran a two-tier domain name test, that is, the linguistic and technical one. At the stage of the linguistic test the check was made whether domain name corresponds the previously specified spelling rules. In compliance with these rules, a declared domain name should not include Latin letters and should consist solely of letters of an official national language of a country to whom the domain is delegated. At the technical stage it was resilience.
On 21 January 2010 the ICANN announced that all the earlier submitted applications were processed and four out of them were approved. In addition to Russia’s application, also approved were those submitted by Egypt, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.
The ICANN’s approval of the application for the Cyrillic domain .РФ signifies that the new domain entirely complies with all the aforementioned linguistic requirements, and the Coordination Center for TLD .RU is fully ready for its technical maintenance and officially becomes its administrator.
The process of launching an IDN-top level domain consists of three stages:
- Preparatory stage where symbolic representation of the new domain name is selected, would-be administrator is chosen, development of domain name administration and preparation of corresponding documentation takes place;
- Application test on domain’s compliance with the linguistic and technical requirements;
- Placement of domain on the root servers of domain name system (DNS).
Now the third stage, that is an immediate placement of the domain on the root servers of the domain name system (DNS) is gaining momentum. The Coordination Center will send an application to the IANA, the ICANN’s authorized technical organization. Having received the application, IANA will insert information about domain .РФ on the root servers of the global domain name system (DNS), which serves as the basis for the Internet. Together with technical tests this process will take some 2-3 months to accomplish.
To date the ICANN has collected 16 applications in 8 languages. Having successfully tested and approved the first four ones, the ICANN is expecting new requests for non-Latin top-level domains. And having successfully passed the Fast Track verification procedure, Russia has one more step to go before the new Cyrillic domain .РФ is put into service that is the technical delegation of the domain.
