Information technology and society: 38th ICANN conference opened in Brussels

On June 21 the 38^th ICANN conference officially opened in Brussels (Belgium). At the grand opening ceremony Rod Backstar, the ICANN corporation president, marked the leading role of the European Union states-members in the development of Internet infrastructure. Among the most dynamically developing national domain areas of European continent the ICANN head also named the Russian domain RU reaching the level of 3 million registrations.

In his address Rod Backstar underlined the delegation of the first four multilingual domains of the higher level among which is the first Cyrillic domain RF. It was noted that this was a result of the joint efficient work of all the concerned parties: the states governments, domains administrators and registrars, communities and users.

Today the experts of the Russian domain registrar Ru-Center are giving the presentation of the RF domain for foreign users of the World network. In particular, the owners of the brands oriented towards the Russian market and the world mass media which included Russia in the area of their diffusion and broadcast, will be given an opportunity to register the Cyrillic domains as a part of the stage taking place until September 30, 2010.

The interest for the Russian national domains arose recently. It is mostly due to the active position which Russia takes lately working on creation of multilingual domains of the higher level. For long years the number of foreign domain owners in RU area had not been more than 3-4%. In the beginning of this year it exceeded for the first time the level of 5% and today it reaches already 19%. In RF domain the overwhelming majority of domain owners is represented by Russian companies, but the interest for registration of the Russian-language domain names is expressed more and more ofter by the owners of foreign brands.

The second stage of the priority registration period will last until September 30. At the present, the applications for domains registrations are accepted from the trade marks owners and the government bodies. From July 1 the preliminary orders for the priority registration of domains from the owners of trade names, the holders of rights for using the name of the goods place of origin, non-commercial organizations and mass media will be accepted. The registration of domains for these categories will start on July 15 and from October 1 the .RF domain will be allowed for registration by anyone who wishes to do so.