A solution how to create fully functional IDN mail service has been found

Participants of TLDCON 2016 kept discussing issues and ways of development of internationalized domains during the session that was held on the second day of TLDCON. Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ is interested in a prompt implementation of the fully functional mail service in non-Latin domains because it will be a new incentive for the growth of the Russian national Cyrillic domain .РФ. This is why session’s moderator Olga Alexandrova- Myasina (ccTLD .RU/.РФ) gave the floor to the chief specialist of applied technical services of the Technical Center of Internet Igor Lidin first, he talked about a new solution that would allow to implement mail service in national languages.

Some time ago TCI using statistics portal Statdom.ru that was developed and is supported by TCI and the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ conducted a research to find out how many primary Runet services support IDN mail. It turned out that internationalized e-mail addresses are supported by only 0.4% of e-mail exchange services on Runet. “New standard UTF-8 for support of internationalized e-mail addresses was developed way back in 2012, however, even today main Internet services don't support it, except for Google. Its e- mail service Gmail started receiving emails from internationalized e-mail addresses way back in 2014”, said Igor Lidin. He also complained that even though both Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ and Technical Center of Internet constantly propose Russian mail services to create IDN mail, Russian companies react with no enthusiasm to this proposal.

Representative of Yandex.Mail Aleksey Shelkovin explained the reason for this sluggish reaction. It turned out that according to internal research done by Yandex only 5.4% of incoming Yandex mail comes from national domains. This is a very small traffic; this is why implementation of IDN mail hasn’t received too much attention. “However, TLDCON showed that there is demand for IDN mail service, this is why I believe we will work in this direction to offer solutions to users. A lot has already been done for the implementation of the fully functioning IDN mail service; this is why announcement that UTF-8 is supported will come soon. I believe that this direction could be a new growth point for Yandex.Mail and I hope that during the next conference we will be able to present our solution!” said Aleksey Shelkovin.

Jevgeniia Voronko (Hoster.by), Sergey Gorbunov (RU-CENTER), Michaela Cruden (Afilias), Marina Nikerova (TCI) and Fedor Smirnov (Realtime Register) also participated in this session.

Second session “Legislative aspects of domain name registration” opened with a report by Maxim Alzoba (FAITID), who explained how problems with personal data protection are solved in the domain name registries. Maria Malysheva (TCI) presented the paperless transfer procedure between domains .RU and .РФ, which was implemented last week. She highlighted that introduction of electronic transfer is useful for users and makes domains .RU and .РФ more competitive on the global market. Katerina Oliinyk (Arzinger) and Yuri Goncharuk (UANIC) spoke during the session about how domain name disputes are resolved in Ukrainian ccTLDs .UA and .УКР and about features of URS procedure application for the new domains. Digital policy expert of the Russian State Duma Dmitry Afanasiev warned registries and above all registrars that today Russian (and not only Russian) courts have started to consider registrars to be responsible for the illegal content found on webpages. This requires registrars to pay more attention to complaints they receive from the rights’ holders. ICANN’s Vice President Michael Yakushev summed up results of this session’s work. He pointed out how important it was to discuss the relationship of legal and technical regulation with international as well as national legal regulation, how to find balance between them and also how important the issue of personal data protection was.

The final session of TLDCON was dedicated to the secondary domain market. Andrey Saveliev (Домены.РФ) estimated that this market’s annual turnover on Runet was of 300 million Rubles. This is quite a significant figure, which means that technical solutions are needed for the secondary market as well. The Technical Center of Internet is involved in this and the head of DNS projects at TCI Pavel Khramtsov talked about special features of DNS services’ organization for the secondary domain market and DNS construction. He pointed out that servers of the secondary market are three times more likely to be subjects to attacks on the DNS, this is why they should be separated from hosting servers. He also talked about the important role that project Netoscope plays on the secondary market: it gives wide opportunities for checking domains that are available for sale on the secondary market. Gevorg Poghosyan (Global R) and Alexander Scherbakov (FAITID) also took part in the session.