On 10 November the “Izvestia” media center hosted a press-conference of the CC director, Mr. Andrey Kolesnikov, on the launch of the open registration period in ccTLD .РФ. He reminded journalists that the open registration period in ccTLD .РФ would be launched on 11November 2010 and open registration would be available solely to the RF citizens and legal entities registered in Russia The ban on changing domain administrator will be effective over a year. “Both restrictions are temporary. In the future these restrictions will likely to be lifted,” – asserted Mr. Kolesnikov. According to Andrey Kolesnikov’s projections, the number of domain names in zone .РФ may hit 100,000 by the end of the year. During the priority registration period some 18,000 more Cyrillic domains have been registered. “Several tens of thousands of domain names will be registered in ccTLD .РФ in the first hours. Let’s see which popular words will be the first ones to be registered,” – said the CC director.
Stop list of obscenities has stirred journalists’ huge interest. Everyone knows it exists but nobody has yet seen it except registrars. “And nobody will see it: it is for the internal use and nobody is going to publicize it,” – informed Mr. Kolesnikov. He added that he personally thinks that this stop list would never prevent creative compatriots from registering any domains. “We have compiled this stop-list in order to prevent the first registered word after the launch of the open registration period to be some ‘f@&*.рф,’” – explained the CC director.
Andrey Kolesnikov also elaborated on opportunities engendered by the new domain zone. “It’s great that it will be possible now not to invent the way how to represent in Latin script many unique Russian letters: Щ, Ц, and my favorite letter Ё. Incidentally, I usually use Ё in writing and don’t replace it with Е. Letter Ё is what we missed over the years of English-speaking Internet’s reign and now it is going to revive. All patriots should register domain names with letter Ё,” – joked he.
There are no limitations on the number of domain names registered on a given individual. “I don’t think the launch of ccTLD .РФ will lead to an upsurge of cybersquatting – to this end we have banned the change of the domain administrator during one year. Basically, there is the professional domain business engaged in registering and subsequent reselling “nice” domain names. Cybersquatting means raiding of somebody’s name for the sake of blackmail and extortion. The rightholders will deal with such cases by themselves. There is a great deal of precedents in ccTLD .RU in this regard.”
Andrey Kolesnikov clarified to the journalists that the CC does not set neither fixed, nor recommended prices for domain names, and this matter has been left to registrars to decide.. “I don’t think that pricing in zone .РФ will differ significantly from the one in zone .RU, which at present accounts for about 500-600 Rb,” – said he.
“From the technical perspective, we are fully ready. The Technical Center of Internet has run several ‘test shots’; all the registrars have had a chance to test registration in the real –time mode. So, we are in anticipation of the G-day,” – concluded Mr. Kolesnikov.
