On November 22, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry held an expanded public meeting involving the committees run by the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ. The meeting included representatives of the legal committee, committees on domain space development and Internet governance, and a registrars’ committee. Among other attendees were patent agents, representatives of rights holders and practicing lawyers who deal with domain names in their work. The meeting was co-chaired by IP Club President Marina Rozhkova and ccTLD Deputy Director for Legal Issues Sergei Kopylov.
The participants discussed a whole number of issues concerning protection of intellectual rights online, domain disputes and the Coordination Center’s projects on developing domain registration systems. The first part of the meeting focused on a letter from the Intellectual Property Court commenting on the current registration and dispute resolution rules. Interim remedies with regard to domain names, the effective terms of such remedies and notification of domain administrators about their enforcement, aroused the greatest attention and the most enthusiastic debates. For example, the patent agents supported extending the interim remedies as it would give them enough time to take the necessary action. Meanwhile, representatives of registrars and the ccTLD called for caution with this approach, arguing that the longer the interim measures were in effect, the greater the possibility that the domain registration would expire, which could result in additional technical problems.
Sergei Kopylov noted that the letter from the Intellectual Property Court prompted discussion on a wide range of issues: “It’s worth noting that queries from the Intellectual Property Court contribute greatly to the public discourse on further improvement of the domain registration rules. We are very grateful to the court for its suggestions and are glad to have the opportunity to move forward with this discussion not only at internal platforms or involving ccTLD specialists but also with contributions from the wider expert community.”
During the second part of the meeting, Deputy Director of the Coordination Center Irina Daneliya presented a ccTLD project on using the Russian Unified System of Identification and Authentication to identify domain administrators in national zones. Technically, this solution would let registrars opt out of storing customers’ personal data and would significantly lower the risk of data leaks since it does not require backing up data in various technological and information systems. Irina Daneliya explained that at this point, the Unified System of Identification and Authentication is so deeply embedded that we can expect that after the transition period the system will be implemented seamlessly. “Almost 60 million people, that is almost the entire working population of the country, are currently signed up to the Gosuslugi.ru public services portal. When it comes to certain types of services, such as enrolling a child in a kindergarten, there is simply no alternative to the portal. We can expect a further increase in the number of Russian citizens who use the online public services and, therefore, we can use them in conjunction with the registration system.”
Coordination Center Director Andrey Vorobyev said that the committee meetings provide very valuable feedback from all the participants in the domain market: “One of the key principles of our work is to take into account the opinions of all the interested parties. The ccTLD advisory committees were established specifically to bring in external expertise to influence the rules and procedures we develop. Public meetings like this one help us build a dialogue with a larger number of potential stakeholders and draw upon extremely valuable comments and suggestions.”
