The 24th HostObzor national forum of host providers and registrars took place on May 26-27 at the Raivola Hotel outside St. Petersburg. The forum, which was organized by the HostObzor project and the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, brought together over 100 accredited domain name registrars, host providers, mobile service providers and internet companies.
For the second year in a row, the forum participants focused on the registration business, the development of Russian domains and the domain infrastructure. This year, the forum featured a working meeting between the Coordination Center and registrars. Taking part were Coordination Center Director Andrei Vorobyev, his deputy for legal issues Sergei Kopylov, Head of the Department for Interaction with Registrars and Customers Georgy Georgiyevsky, Support Team manager Yulia Demchenko, and the center’s infrastructure analyst Alexander Shcherbakov.
Andrei Vorobyev told HostObzor participants about the current operations of the Coordination Center and its future plans. He presented the results of the meeting of the Coordination Center Council that had previously taken place, outlined the plans regarding the development of the Netoscope project and the improvement of competent organizations' role in providing for the safety of the Russian internet. He said that law enforcement agencies should be in charge of counteracting illegal activity on the internet, while registrars and related organizations should block domains related to websites with illegal content with urgency.
During the meeting, the registrars asked many questions, from the use of DNSSEC to the legal issues of working with domain names. Alexander Shcherbakov said the Coordination Center and the Technical Center of Internet do fully support DNSSEC, but customers seem to show no interest in it. The same situation is in other countries, with the exception of those who enforce the DNSSEC introduction, like the Czech Republic.
Sergei Kopylov spoke about the Coordination Center’s approaches to domain disputes. “Our basic principle is to not take part in domain disputes. We try to stay away from them and only implement court decisions. We want to relieve registrars from making decisions in this area, and we say that in the documents we issue,” he said.
Igor Lidin, chief expert at the Technical Center of Internet, talked about the process of introducing IND mail in Russia and the world and the center’s efforts in this area. He said that only 25 percent of all emails are written in English: more customers prefer writing in their native language. Therefore, the introduction of EAI standard is a relevant issue, even though there are many difficulties. As of now, in Russia only Gmail and Почта.рус support this standard. “Yandex also said that they were working on it and I’m sure as soon as they announce that they support EAI, all other main Russian email services will follow,” Lidin added.
On the second day of the conference, Mikhail Anisimov, deputy head of the Coordination Center Information Service, spoke about the global trends of domain space development. “The .RU domain ranks fifth among national domains and 10th among all top-level domains. The .RU domain has shown stable growth over the past 1.5 years. New gTLDs are beginning to fall behind showing negative growth (even the leaders such as .XYZ and .TOP). IDN domains are pretty stable, while .РФ retains its leading position,” he said.
In conclusion, Mikhail Anisimov invited all forum participants to take part in the fall conference of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, TLDCON 2017, which will take place on September 6 and 7 in Kazakhstan.
