The Council of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ held a regular meeting on February 27. The center’s director, Andrey Vorobyev, presented the budget for 2017. The new budget raises the costs for registration, renewal and changes in technical support operators in the domains .RU and .РФ by 50 rubles: from today’s 70 rubles to 120 rubles excluding VAT. The council reviewed and approved the budget.
Thus, starting in June 2017, registration, renewal and changing technical support operators in domains .RU and .РФ will cost more. This increase has come as no surprise to most people who are involved in this market: there has been talk about the need to raise prices since 2012. The cost of domain name registration and renewal in the .RU domain has not changed since 2007, for almost 10 years. The cost of the domain name registration and renewal in .РФ in 2011 equaled the cost in the .RU.
The Coordination Center’s survey showed that there would not be any serious decrease in the number of registered domain names. The price increase will mostly affect small low-margin registrars that provide services to domain investors.
Council members from the registrar community said that the price increase would improve the working conditions of the registrars and contribute to holding major marketing programs to promote the Russian national domains .RU and .РФ, as well as modernizing the infrastructure and developing the registration system.
Andrey Vorobyev spoke about the control of prices set by registrars: “Together with the Regional Public Center for Internet Technologies, we are launching a public control mechanism to monitor prices for domain names. It is very important to prevent our registrars, who have doubled retail prices in the past few years, from passing this negligible (as compared to the final price) increase to their clients.”
The council also approved the Regulation on the Stabilization Fund of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ and decided to allocate part of the undistributed profits of the past years to its creation. The fund will create financial reserves for emergency situations that can affect the stable and safe operation of the Russian domain space. The council also discussed and approved decisions on other issues.
