Another edition of the annual report by the Coordination Center for TLD.RU/.РФ, The 2017 Russian Domain Space: Results and Development Prospects, has been published. For the ninth time, the report highlights the most important as well as interesting events in the Russian and global domain industry over the previous year.
The main 2017 trends revealed by the report include higher risks to information security and slower growth of the global domain space. After two years of a rapid increase, the number of domain names in the domains registered under the ICANN New gTLD program significantly dropped. Over the past year, the recently created domain zones lost almost five million domain names in total. As a result, the domain space expanded by less than 1%. As of the end of 2017, there were 332,400,000 registered domain names in the world, which is only 0.9% more than in 2016 (in 2015 and 2016 the domain space grew by an average of 6.8%).
As of late 2017, as many as 5,368,952 domain names were registered in the .RU Russian national domain. It is the ninth result in the world among TLDs, both national, common-use and new domains. .RU domain is the fifth largest among top-level domains (ccTLDs) after China (.CN), Germany (.DE), the United Kingdom (.UK) and the Netherlands (.NL). As of the end of 2017, 870,403 domain names were in the .RU domain. It is the 19th result among ccTLDs in Europe and the first in the world among IDN domains.
A separate section of the report focuses on cybersecurity. The section particularly looks at Netoscope, a project joined by four new members in 2017, including two foreign companies. The report also provides performance data of competent organisations. Specifically, after processing requests from competent organisations in late 2017, more than 93% violating domains were blocked from delegating.
The report also maps out .RU and .РФ domain name emergence across Russian regions, provides charts and diagrams on the status of Russian and foreign domains, as well as detailed information about accredited Russian registrars, among others.
The report was based on data of the CCTLD projects, Russia Domains and Netoscope, as well as foreign sources.
