RIPN Participating in "Domain .RU Live Issues" Round-Table as Part of RELARN 2008 Conference

"Domain .RU Live Issues" round-table was launched as part of XV regional representation scientific-educational network conference "RELARN 2008". The attendees addressed most live issues for domain industry development in Russia. The achievements and problems of Russian national domain RU were expressed by Alexey Platonov - RIPN Director, Vladimir Molchanov - RIPN Deputy Director for "RU and SU Domains Technical Center" project, a member of the RU Domain Coordination Center Council, Pavel Khramtsov - RU-CENTER lead analyst, and Andrey Vorobiev - RU-CENTER Public Relations Department Manager. Alexey Soldatov - Chairman of Internet Development Fund Board (this year the Fund provided General Sponsorship for the Conference) and Ekaterina Manko - RU-CENTER Projects Manager made presentations on SU domain development.

Round table participants expressed a high opinion of the activity of the National Domain Technical Center that provides stable and continuous functioning of the Russian Internet. Alexey Platonov made a detailed speech about RIPN project for development of RU domain root server nodes, with its primary target to optimize DNS traffic run. Whereas setup of these nodes was initially planned in all seven RF Federal Districts and in some European countries, this program has a broader outlook up to date: as provisionally scheduled, Secondary DNS-servers of RU domain will appear on US Western and Eastern coasts and in Asia (assumingly in Hong-Kong and Tokio).

Educational society representatives, playing a significant role in the conference, addressed the issue on appearance of uncensored domain names in the Russian Internet. Andrey Vorobiev told that .RU domain registration rules approved by the National Domain Coordination Center forbid the accredited registrars to register offensive and immoral words and expressions as domain names. But each registrar solves this issue at its own discretion, as there is no uniform taboo list. Vladimir Molchanov stressed that this list is unlikely to be reasonable. This will be an open list anyway and require constant updating. The best way is to maintain a status-quo and settle all disputes in court. To prevent occurrence of problematic domains, the registrars should be more responsible to meet registration rules while processing the queries.

The reasons for boosting .RU domain and a potential to register domain names therein in Russian became another subject of the round table encouraged by the attendees. Alexey Soldatov - Chairman of Internet Development Fund Board acting as SU registrant gave a brief summary of the domain history and outlined its outlook.

Up to date International Standardization Organization (ISO) made a decision that bi-lateral country codes that have expired for some reasons will be reserved in the country and territory code table for 50 years from the year of official extinction of the state. In particular compliance to this table, bi-lateral domains will be delegated to the countries and territories. Following these rules, the existence term of SU code and domain is limited to 2042. However, according to Alexey Soldatov, the issue on domain retention for uncertain long term is vigorously discussed.

Ekaterina Manko - RU-CENTER Project Manager briefed on the results of opening SU Multilanguage domain registration. In less than a month's period the domain has been enlarged by almost 15 th. names in Russian, Greek, Armenian, Hebrew and other languages. A total number of Secondary-level domains in SU zone already exceeds 65 th.