Bustle around Russia

FSO abandoned domains like Putin2012.RF, but the sediment remained

At noon on November 11, the long-promised open registration of domains in the Russian-speaking zone.RF took off. For about a year, the stage of priority registration continued - for authorities and government agencies, as well as owners ...

At noon on November 11, the long-promised open registration of domains in the Russian-speaking zone.RF took off. For about a year, the stage of priority registration continued - for authorities and government agencies, as well as owners of registered trademarks. And finally, everyone has access to Internet addresses in Russian.

According to experts' forecasts, about 80,000 Russian-speaking addresses were to be registered in the zone.RF on the first day. The reality surpassed any forecasts - the specified threshold was overcome within a little over an hour, and by the end of the first day in the Russian-speaking zone there were already more than 250 thousand domains. Moreover, only less than 19 thousand of them were purchased at the stage of priority registration.

As of Monday morning, November 15, the number of domains in the .RF zone exceeded 400 thousand - in the .RU zone, such a number of addresses have been registered over 10-odd years of its existence, from April 1994 to September 2005. According to Olga Ermakova, PR manager of the Coordinating Center for the National Internet Domain (CC), “in just one day of its existence in the open registration mode, domain.RF entered the top twenty largest European domains and outstripped Finland in terms of the number of registered domains.”

At first, KC, as the main manager of the entire domain economy in Russia, intended to arrange an auction of the most “delicious” domain names. But in the future, not without hints from the FAS, it was decided to leave this idea, leaving the decision at the mercy of the registrar companies.

But this measure, of course, did not save us from cybersquatters or scandals. Even at the beginning of priority registration, last fall, a certain company that registered certain trademarks filed applications for many domains consisting of popular commonly used words: Sex.rf, Bank.rf, Dating.rf, Kino.rf, etc. then he took a break, but in the end he decided that everything was legal: if the trademark did not meet with objections, then KC could not do anything here.

After the end of the priority registration stage, in September, another scandal erupted: it turned out that the FSO registered the largest number of Russian-language domains (more than 400), and among them were war.rf, 20.rf, 2020.rf, clearly not related to the state, ru.rf, rf.rf, blog.rf, letters.rf, valdai.rf and others. The topic of registration of such domains as putin-2012.rf, putin2012.rf, GDP-2012.rf was discussed the most in the media, while the domains medvedev-2012.rf and medvedev2012.rf remained unoccupied. A couple of days later, the FSO abandoned the domains linking Putin with the elections, but the residue remained.

It should be noted that with the start of open registration, the domains putin2012.rf, putin-2012.rf, medvedev2012.rf, medvedev-2012.rf immediately ended up in the hands of private individuals who, according to Marker, do not hide their intentions to them earn. It is not difficult to get around the restriction that prohibits changing the owner during the year: you can rent it to an interested person, you can sell it with the right of official transfer later.

Many users and experts are still skeptical about the very idea of ​​domains in national languages. A number of experts (including the well-known Internet figure Anton Nosik), do not hesitate to call what is happening a "scam" and a "scam".

Of course, some people are on the hype around.RF will warm their hands, and the practical value of Russian-language domains is still in great doubt, but once the Russified Windows was also called unnatural.