RIPN Attended the First International Conference of CIS, Central and Western Europe National Domain Registrars and Registrants

The First International Conference of CIS, Central and Western Europe National Domain Registrars and Registrants took place in Sofia, Bulgaria, on September 8-10, 2008. The greeting of George Pyrvanov, President of Bulgaria, was read out at the official opening ceremony. The President's message and the speech of Bulgarian Communication Administration officials was specifically focused on the Russian-Bulgarian cooperation in obtaining by these countries Cyrillic top level domains on a Fast Track basis.

Bart Boswinkel, ICANN, stressed the growing demand in IDN on the part of the Internet community. Development of registration policy for non-Latin domains will normally take 2-7 years. Temporary "no-queue" solution remains thus one of the hot issues. The world speaks nearly 7 ths. languages, and many of them may apply for the "fast-track" procedure. Further details were well known to those, who closely watched the development of the procedure. A language shall have an official territorial status (to be used for application to the state authorities). Top-level domain shall represent a territory or its part. The writing has a non-Latin structure and there is a prepared symbol table. Virtually, these are baseline requirements that are enough to enter the startling line. Both Russian and Bulgarian applications submitted this June fully meet these. ICANN is planning to fast-track implementation of IDN TLD, collect comments on a "fast-track" basis and update IDNA protocol.

The matter of occurrence of such domains was qualified as a "burning issue" by Andrey Romanov, Director of RU Domain Coordination Center, who made a review presentation on development of the Russian national domain. He noted that to-date RU domain has nearly 1 635 000 second level domains, 90% of which have been delegated.

RU Domain Coordination Center and Russian Institute of Public Networks (RIPN), acting as a domain technical center, take major efforts to reengineer RU domain infrastructure: Domain RU Secondary DNS Nodes are under deployment, the potential of implementation of IPv6 and DNSSEC technologies into RU zone is being discussed. Technical aspects of this issue will be addressed at RIPE NCC Moscow Conference to be held September 23-24. As estimated by Andrey Romanov, if the situation favors, state-of-the-art technologies may be implemented at the end of this year. Vladimir Molchanov, RIPN, gave a much conservative estimate, saying that implementation of IPv6 and DNSSEC technologies in RU zone will start next year.

The focal point of the conference was interaction of registration systems and registrars, so the conference attendees addressed not only traditional "abstractive", ICANN-oriented issues, but also pending matters, for example, the specifics of registrars' accreditation procedure in a particular national domain. The representatives of Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic and Romania spoke about the situation around the domains entrusted to them. It is well known that our Ukrainian neighbors are still facing the stringency of regulations in registration, obliging the majority of users to register third level domains in public subdomains. Apparently, liberalization of regulations will sooner or later become a matter of urgency.

The first meeting that united registrars and registration systems of CIS and Western Europe countries was successful. This was an opinion of a majority of the attendees. About 100 representatives from 25 countries attended the conference. The sponsors plan to put this event on a regular basis, continuing to refocus on interaction of registrars and national registration systems. As tentatively estimated, the next meeting will take place in Ukraine.