Transition prohibited

Commercial top-level domains will not appear soon

According to RU-CENTER, the largest domain name registrar in Russia, commercial top-level domain names (such as .gazprom or .ibm) will appear on the Internet no earlier than 2011.

At the 38th ICANN conference (the organization that regulates the development of the Internet - Ed. ) in Brussels, which ended on June 25, the fourth version of the rules for registering new top-level domain names (New gTLD) was presented. But many important issues remained unresolved. At the conference, ICANN representatives were unable to give at least approximate dates for the start of registration of new top-level domains. According to Andrey Vorobyov, director of the public relations department at RU-CENTER, this may happen no earlier than 2011. At the moment, the rules only fully resolve issues of possible conflict situations - such as, for example, when several applicants apply for the same domain name at once.

At the moment, in Russia, the authorities of the Republic of Tatarstan are expressing a desire to acquire their own domain zone. They claim the .tat domain, as well as the Cyrillic .tat domain. Director of the Coordination Center for the National Internet Domain Andrey Kolesnikov notes that even when the New gTLD rules are approved, Tatarstan will only be able to register its domain in the Latin alphabet: “There is a rule - IDN (Internationalized Domain Names - top-level domain names written in symbols national alphabet) should not be spelled completely identical to Latin letters." And in upper case, the Latin spelling .TAT is indistinguishable from .TAT, written in Cyrillic.

It was for essentially the same reason that at the 38th ICANN meeting, Bulgaria was denied registration of its own IDN: the domain name .bg, according to ICANN representatives, is too similar to the Brazilian national zone .br.

Ukraine will not be able to get its own Cyrillic domain name. Firstly, this country claims a three-letter domain .ukr, while national domains have two letters. The previous example with Tatarstan is a different matter; here we are not talking about a national domain, but about a so-called commercial top-level domain issued in accordance with the New gTLD. Secondly, all the letters in the name .ukr are identical in spelling to the characters of the Latin alphabet.

During the conference, three Asian countries - China, Taiwan and Hong Kong - managed to acquire their own non-Latin top-level domains. “At the same time, countries managed to avoid conflict situations due to the desire to use the same hieroglyphs in the name of the domain zone,” says Andrey Vorobyov.

Let us recall that in the spring of this year IDNs were delegated to Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Commercial domain zones and individual cities may appear. According to Andrei Vorobyov, the authorities of some megacities have already submitted preliminary applications. Moscow is not among them yet.

Registering commercial top-level domains requires certain costs. The applicant must pay ICANN $158 thousand. In addition, they will have to pay for the labor of specialists who will perform the labor-intensive work of preparing and maintaining the application.





Prepared jointly with RIA Novosti

Olga FEDINA, RIA Novosti, -- for Vremya Novostei