IT and society: First results of .RF domain registration

By January, 11 2010 the Russian Registrar RU-Center has reserved 5058 domains in .rf zone in accordance with inquiries of trade marks’ owners. RIA PrimaMedia informs that, from November, 25 2009 to January, 11 2010 RU-Center specialists have processed 14 038 inquiries. 8117 of them were received from the owners of trademarks. Over 35% of inquiries were turned down for different reasons.

These were often the owners of trademarks, who submitted inquiries for domain names, which in their turn didn’t correspond to the full trademark names, and also the owners of brands, which contained words in Latin. There were other reasons to decline the inquiries: the inquiry was submitted not by the possessor of the rights; the trademark consists of undecipherable graphic elements; the trademark registration hasn’t been yet completed; the brand’s registration has expired; the trademark registration has been cancelled etc.

Several companies’ inquiries were turned down because “the domain name is forbidden for usage”. It is caused by the parallel domain reservation for the government needs. The RU-Center has received about 70 "twin inquiries" from the owners of similar trademarks, registered in different classes of rendered goods and services. Thus, the figures show that the rights to obtain 129 domains are each time being contested by 2 different applicants, who possess priority rights on the relevant Russian-language trademarks, three applicants are laying claims to 11 domain names, whereas the domain Raduga.rf is at the same time being contested by 5 applicants.

According to the number of .rf domains registered by RU-Center Moscow is leading: over the half of all trademarks registered in the Cyrillic zone is possessed by the Moscow trademark owners. Than follows the Moscow region with 11,4%. The third place is given to St. – Petersburg with 8% of registered trademarks. 7 percent of all the .RF domains registered by RU-Center is possessed by the foreign residents.