Information technology and regions of Russia: Application for .MOSCOW and .MOSKVA domain zones will be submitted in February 2012

Muscovites, Moscow companies and organizations will be given the right to take part in the priority period of registration of .MOSCOW and .MOSKVA domains. The initiative was suggested at the joint meeting of the Board of Administration and the Board of Guardians of the Internet Technology and Infrastructure Development Support Fund which supervises the project of creation of Moscow domains. The application for the domain zones will be ready by mid February 2012 and then will be submitted to ICANN Corporation.

The domains will be created as a part of the New gTLD procedure. The ICANN will accept application for it from January 12 to April 12, 2012. Then they will be evaluated during six months. The delegation of the first domains approved under New gTLD procedure will take place in the end of 2012. Thus, the priority registration of names in .MOSCOW and .MOSKVA domains can already start in early 2013.

A part of names in Moscow domains will be reserved for federal and Moscow government bodies. The list of these domains will be made by the Fund and submitted to core agencies for endorsement. It will include some hundreds of names reserved for government needs in the RF zone. .MOSCOW and .MOSKVA domains will also have a stop-list of names prohibited for registration due to discrepancy with norms of morality and law. It will be based on the similar document developed for the .RF domain. Finally, about a hundred of domains of second level in Moscow domain zones will be reserved in order to open in them preferential registration of the third level domains. For instance, there will be created the .SCHOOL.MOSCOW domain, whose names will be attributed to Moscow schools.

The rules of Moscow domains will be different from those of the national zones .RU and .RF. The reason is that according to ICANN classification .MOSCOW and .MOSKVA will formally belong to the category of domains of general use that is why their rules have to comply with the demands of the corporation made of this type of domain zones.

The right to provide services of registration of names .MOSCOW and .MOSKVA will be given only to registrars accredited by ICANN or supplementary accredited by the Fund. The ICANN accreditation is the general requirement of the corporation of the domains of general use such as the zones of the capital.

However, today in the territory of Russia there are only 3 registrars accredited by ICANN. Their number is expected to increase by summer of 2013 when MOSCOW and .MOSKVA domains will open the domain names registration.