On May 25-27, the XXXVI All-Russian Forum of hosting providers and domain registrars "HostObzor" was held in the Leningrad Region. The forum was attended by top managers and specialists of Russian companies providing hosting and domain registration services.
The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ acted as a co-organizer of the forum and held a domain section, which was moderated by Georgy Georgievsky, Head of the Department for Work with Registrars and Users of the Center.
Georgy Georgievsky made a presentation “We work for you!” about the services of the Coordination Center for users and registrars. He talked about the domain name valuation methodology as a set of methods and algorithms that can be used to obtain the predicted price of the market value of a domain name. This was followed by a story about the WHOIS + and how important information about a domain is in a convenient form and in Russian, and about the Domains and Trademarks service, which makes it possible to protect copyright holders and prevent possible domain disputes.
A brand-new domain name selection service that enables the use of search terms and other criteria to choose domain names that are open for registration was thoroughly described. The lively interest of the listeners was aroused by the fact that the selection of the registrar became the completion of the selection.
Another new one - the Registrar's Personal Account on the website of the Coordination Center - is intended for the registrars to enter general information about themselves, the services provided and promotions for reflection on the registrars' cards. Of great interest and many clarifying questions was the message about the service under development with the conditional name "Registry Lock" - a service that will be provided by the Coordination Center to registrars, who, in turn, provide a service to domain name administrators in .RU/.РФ. Registry Lock provides special domain protection at the Registry level against unintentional or intentional changes by unauthorized (unauthorized) persons of data about the domain, about deleting or transferring a domain, changing DNS servers.
Georgy Georgievsky also spoke about working meetings and seminars held by the Coordination Center for registrar staff in order to improve their skills. Participants of the domain section discussed the possibility of joint marketing campaigns of the Coordination Center with registrars - and in the future with hosting providers.
Among the questions of participants in the domain section were ones about the possibility of introducing a multi-year registration and about changing the life cycle of a domain name - introducing a period for restoring a registration after the expiration of the renewal period. The story about “Study the Internet & Govern It!” aroused great interest - everyone was interested in the topic of marking up Internet content to support people with visual impairments, and the audience asked the Center staff to hold a separate seminar on this topic and share their experience. Also, the participants of the domain section drew attention to the fact that there is a request from almost all categories of hosting service users for special webinars on cybersecurity, the need to expand the audience to the elderly was especially emphasized.
The domain section was continued by Center’s infrastructure consultant Vadim Mikhailov with the report "Internationalization Of Domain And Mail Addressing: World Statistics, Our Initiatives And Existing Solutions". He noted that today there are 152 IDNs in the world, 61 of them belong to national top-level domains, and there are only 17 top-level domains in Cyrillic, 9 of which belong to national TLDs. The .РФ domain ranks 1st among Cyrillic IDN TLDs and 2nd among all IDN TLDs in the world in terms of the number of second-level domain names registered in it.
Vadim Mikhailov shared the experience of the Coordination Center in ensuring the Universal Acceptance of Cyrillic domains and e-mail addresses, and also spoke about the Поддерживаю.РФ project and other initiatives of the Center. In conclusion, he said that today there is a steady interest of users in the concept of Universal Acceptance - a state when all Internet-based applications, devices and systems correctly and uniformly accept, validate, store, process and display all correct domain names and email addresses. In addition, interest is gradually emerging from the side of the state, and this is partly due to the fact that there is everything necessary for the implementation of universal acceptance: Internet standards have been developed, there are operating system tools, there are software libraries, and software is constantly being improved, both opensource, as well as proprietary.
The next, autumn HostObzor forum will be held in November-December 2023. See you on the forum!
