Experts explained the requirement for government agencies to move to .RU and .РФ domains

Experts interviewed by RBC noted thatthat the government's requirements for the mandatory registration of government agencies' email addresses on Russian domains may be related to problems with paying for sites in foreign domain zones

The government has released a draft resolution that specifies the requirements for state bodies and local governments from December 1, 2022 to create email addresses using domain names and network addresses located in the Russian national domain zone (.RU, .РФ and .SU). Experts interviewed by RBC did not see any problems in the implementation of the project.

According to Ivan Begtin, HEAD of the ANO Information Culture, the new requirements are apparently related to the problems of state agencies with paying for sites in foreign domain zones, which began this spring. According to the expert, similar government services in foreign domain zones, as well as government agencies that use a non-Cyrillic name in the postal address, are “quite a large number”, for example, EMIAS, which is located at emias.info (a generic top-level domain that does not apply to national Russian domain zone). He believes that such a transition, if the bill is passed, could take only about a month. Begtin found it difficult to estimate the cost of the transition.

According to the Ministry of Digital Development for 2021, government agencies accounted for less than 1% of all Russian domains.

Andrey Vorobyov, head of the Coordination Center for .RU and .РФ domains, told RBC that the ground for the appearance of this bill had been prepared for a long time, and today this approach has become especially relevant due to the aggravated international situation and attempts by some countries and organizations to build barriers in a single Internet space.

“The Internet has long been a part of the modern economy, and the importance of the stable functioning of all Internet services, including e-mail, cannot be overestimated. At the same time, Russian operators can guarantee the stable operation of all services in the Russian domain space, which includes the .RU, .РФ and .SU domains,” he said.

Also, according to him, for the .РФ domain, as well as for all other IDN domains in the world, there is a problem of universal acceptance, when all valid domain names and email addresses are correctly and uniformly accepted, checked, stored, processed and displayed in all applications and internet services.

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According to the Russian Domains statistics service, almost 5 million domains are registered in the .RU zone, 676,000 in the .РФ zone and another 105,000 in the .SU zone. Globally, .RU is ranked 6th after .TK (Tokelau, New Zealand Dependent Territory), .CN ( CHINA ), .DE (Germany), .UK (UK) and .NL (Netherlands).

Last June, the Ministry of Digital Development proposed the creation of a special domain registrar for the websites of government agencies, organizations with state participation and non-profit organizations, "whose activities are aimed at ensuring state and public security and the implementation of state functions, national goals and strategic development tasks." According to the ministry, the adoption of the bill will have a positive impact on "protecting the rights of government agencies to domains" and "protecting the rights of citizens" when going to the official websites of government agencies and state-owned companies.

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