SPIС 2016, the biggest Internet conference in Russia’s northwestern region, has opened in St. Petersburg. The two-day conference brings together experts, communications and IT professionals, representatives of Russian IT companies, and St. Petersburg Internet business leaders. More than 2,600 people plan to attend this year’s conference.
Addressing the opening session, Director of the Coordination Center for TLD RU/РФ Andrey Vorobyev, presented the current statistics for the registration of domain names under the .RU and .РФ domains. The Northwestern Federal District, he said, is firmly in second place among Russia’s federal districts in terms of domain name registrations. Only the Central Federal District has higher figures.
“St. Petersburg is in third place overall among the Russian regions for the number of .RU and .РФ domains,” Mr Vorobyev said. “Only Moscow and the Moscow Region are ahead. Here [in St. Petersburg], we have three of the 35 accredited registrars in the country, and another registrar for the Northwestern Federal District is in Kaliningrad. All of the biggest Russian domain registrars also have offices in St. Petersburg,” he said.
Mr Vorobyev also gave an update on the expected start of the second stage of the ICANN New gTLD program. “St. Petersburg residents are registering domain names in the new domain zones too, but we will not see a St. Petersburg geographical domain name before 2019; ICANN has postponed the start of the second stage of accepting bids for new domains until then,” he said.
