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Russian registry to apply for “.children”

Kevin Murphy, November 28, 2011, Domain Registries

The Russian .ru domain name registry has announced plans to apply for .ДЕТИ, the Russian word for “.children”, under ICANN’s new generic top-level domains program.
It’s the first public announcement of a top-level internationalized domain name that is not geographic nor a transliteration of an existing TLD.
Coordination Center for TLD RU, the registry, said that the initiative was inspired by the success of .РФ (.rf), which is on track to register its millionth domain before the end of the year.
Registry CEO Andrey Kolesnikov said in a statement: “We kicked off preparations for the applying for another top-level domain – .ДЕТИ, which should for an Internet space reserved exclusively for the youngest users.”
IDN gTLDs are one of the benefits of the new gTLD program that nobody — not even trademark interests — disputes, but until now there were no “proper” examples to cite.
VeriSign and Afilias have already announced plans for IDN versions of their existing gTLDs – .com, .net and .info – and ICANN has approved IDN ccTLDs for a couple dozen nations.

One in five .рф domains have web sites

Kevin Murphy, November 14, 2011, Domain Registries

The .рф registry celebrated its first launch anniversary last week, with almost one million .рф names registered and apparently almost one in five domains with an active web site.
According to RU-Center, which says it is the registrar of record for 40% of .рф (.rf) names, about 18% of the Cyrillic domains registered in the last year resolve to full web sites.
The registrar said in a press release:

18% of names have website, 16% do redirect, 4% are on parking, 15% are just delegated but not available, and 15% have a plug webpage. 29% of .RF names are unused.

That compares to the 18.7% use penetration of .info, which has been around for over a decade, assuming RU-Center and Afilias compiled their numbers using a similar methodology.
RU-Center also said that 94% of .рф sunrise registrations have been renewed. The rate of landrush registration renewals, which give an indication of what speculators think of the space, will not be clear until December, it said.
It is apparently now also possible for non-Russians to obtain .рф domains.

Court throws out Russian gaming scandal claims

Kevin Murphy, November 2, 2011, Domain Registrars

Russian registrar RU-Center has won its appeal against a $7.5 million government fine, following claims that it gamed the launch of .РФ, registering tens of thousands of names to itself.
The Moscow Arbitration Court yesterday reversed the decision of the Federal Antimonoply Service, according to a statement from RU-Center, the .РФ registry and local media reports.
The dispute centers on the launch of the Cyrillic-script ccTLD last November, which saw over 200,000 registrations in the first six hours and half a million domains registered in the first few weeks.
RU-Center was quickly hit by claims that it had used its access to the registry, ccTLD Coordination Center, to register over 65,000 premium names to itself in order to auction them to users.
It later emerged that some of the Coordination Center’s launch policy-setters had ownership interests in RU-Center either directly or through family members.
In challenging the FAS ruling, RU-Center said that it only registered domains in its own name, via other registrars, because it had taken over 120,000 pre-orders from customers but was limited to filing 4,800 registrations per hour by the registry.
It also said that the domains remained in its own name because registry rules prohibited transfers during the first year of registration. The transfers will be effective November 11, it said.

Will a Russian domain sell for more than Sex.com?

Kevin Murphy, November 25, 2010, Domain Sales

The scandal-hit Russian domain name market may yet produce some of the most expensive domain name sales of all time. Premium .рф generics are already attracting eight-figure bids.
Bids of $10 million have apparently been placed on at least two domains, квартиры.рф and бетон.рф (apartments.rf and concrete.rf), in the controversial quasi-landrush auction managed by RU-Center, the largest Russian registrar.
IDNblog.com is reporting the apartments.rf asking price, and a reader was kind enough to send me a screenshot of the concrete.rf auction.
If these bids are for real, and these auctions were to close, they would immediately occupy the number two and three slots on the league table of all-time biggest-ticket domain sales
Before sex.com sold for $13 million, DNJournal’s top twenty list had fund.com in the top spot, at $9,999,950, followed by porn.com at $9,500,000 and diamond.com at $7,500,000.
The RU-Center auctions may not close, however.
As I reported yesterday, the registrar and five others are being investigated on antitrust grounds by Russian competition authorities, after allegedly registering tens of thousands of domains to themselves.
The auctions are currently frozen and the .рф registry, Coordination Center for ccTLD, has made noises about applying “sanctions” to the registrars that could include de-accreditation.
RU-Center, which confusingly does business at nic.ru, has defended its position in at least two articles here and here (in Russian, naturally).
As far as I can tell, none of these auctions will close until the registrar and the registry resolve their differences and/or the Russian government probe concludes.
However, it’s pretty obvious that the demand for Cyrillic generic IDNs is enormous in Russia, and could easily challenge .com on the big-sale league tables.