On 24 May, the CC’s representatives attended a regular meeting of the Federal Antimonopoly Service by. The meeting dealt with the issue of allocation of domain names in IDN TLD .РФ. As a reminder, as the FAS of Russia lacked required documents the hearing on the case was already put off several times.
At the meeting, the Coordination Center filed a motion for admission of additional documents to the case. The documents in question are related to results of the examination of RU-CENTR (JSC RSITS’s) operations in its capacity of an accredited in IDN TLD .РФ registrar. In connection with the motion, the Commission of the FAS of Russia adjourned the meeting for a few hours in order to study the findings. The CC’s motion was granted and the Commission filed the examination findings with other documents of the case.
The results of the examination exposed, in particular, violation both of the Accreditation Agreement and the Registration Terms and Conditions (including the priority one) in IDN TLD .РФ. Representative of JSC “RSITS” maintained at the meeting that revealed violations could be remedied. In this respect, JSC “RSITS” is going to contact owners of the domains, which were registered with violations.
That implies de-facto auctioned off domains: these domains are administered not by the users who purchased the domain at the auction, but by RU-CENTER. This is ascribed to measures aimed at combating cybersquatting, which were adopted in the course of development of Registration Terms and Conditions in IDN TLD .РФ: domain names in the Cyrillic domain are not subject to change of the owner over the first year of their registration. In order to remedy the situation, JSC “RSITS” in the near future will have to cancel the entries in the registry and register domains not on themselves but on their legitimate owners. In the event the domain name is intercepted by another registrar at the moment of cancellation of the entry in the registry, the user who purchased the domain at the auction will get his money back. For all other users who purchased their domains at the auction and not requesting an immediate transfer of the ownership rights for domains, on 11 November 2011, the domains will automatically change the owner. In the event all the violations are not remedied until 25 December 2011, RU-CENTER may face suspension of accreditation.
According to the RU-CENTER’s representative, the money collected from the users at the auctions will be partly returned to the company’s clients and the rest will be invested in projects on Internet technologies.
The Commission raised the issue of guarantees for users: it remains unclear how the company can warrant a transfer to the client of the domain name upon one year since the launch of the open registration is guaranteed. According to JSC “RSITS”, the transfer of the rights is guaranteed by contractual obligations.
At the meeting, the JSC “RSITS” representatives denied the fact of violation of the antimonopoly law by maintaining that a large number of domains are fungible and, consequently, do not fall under the effect of the antimonopoly law.
The FAS of Russia decided to postpone the Commission’s meeting due to the need to obtain additional evidence. The date of the next meeting will be set later.
The Coordination Center is going to follow up on the case of allocation of domain names in IDN TLD .РФ.
