Experts from the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ addressed the 85th Conference of the Asia Pacific Top Level Domain Association (APTLD85), which is currently taking place in India.
Vadim Mikhailov, consultant for Infrastructure of the Coordination Center, had the floor at the Self Certification of EAI section, dedicated to the issues of universal acceptance of domain names and email addresses. He spoke about a system for checking the readiness of the email service to work with Cyrillic email addresses, created as part of the project Поддерживаю.РФ.
The expert noted that the goal of the Поддерживаю.РФ project is to develop an ecosystem for supporting domain names and email addresses in national languages – and, above all, in the Cyrillic zone .РФ.
“The program we created for checking the readiness of software to work with IDN and EAI includes 5 stages: completing a training course, studying the “Recommendations for supporting Cyrillic domain names and email addresses in the .РФ domain zone,” testing your software and making the necessary changes, preparing a short descriptions of software functionality and IDN/EAI processing capabilities, sending test results and descriptions to the experts of the project Поддерживаю.РФ. Based on the results of their consideration, the developer can receive confirmation of the implementation in his software or support service for universal acceptance, i.e. support for domain names and email addresses in the top-level domain .РФ,” Vadim Mikhailov said.
On the second day of the Conference, Olga Baskakova, Project Manager of the Coordination Center, spoke addressed the session “Whois and RDAP: the Overview and Impact of Changes on ccTLDs”, where the implementation of the RDAP protocol in top-level domains was discussed. She shared experience in implementing and using the WHOIS and RDAP protocols in the ccTLDs .RU and .РФ. Olga noted that despite the fact that the implementation of RDAP in Russian national domains began three years ago, in February 2021, today only 3 out of 131 accredited registries use RDAP. Registrars note that so far they do not see significant advantages of RDAP over Whois, and the implementation of this protocol is not an easy procedure and requires significant effort.
However, the number of RDAP requests for 2023 increased more than 130 times: from 190 requests in January to more than 25,000 requests in December.
“The Coordination Center, as the national registry for the .RU and .РФ domains, actively uses the RDAP protocol - for example, as a protocol for implementing the Whois+, by which users can receive information in a more convenient form. In addition, the service allows you to connect with other Center’s services, for example, with the trademark verification service,” Olga said.
Recall that Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) is a computer network communications protocol that is the successor to the WHOIS protocol. Unlike WHOIS, which essentially returns free text, RDAP provides data in standard machine-readable JSON format. With this protocol, error codes, user identification, authentication, and access control can be delivered over HTTP.
