Learning About CIS, Central and Eastern European Domains

For the last couple of days I’ve been in the lovely town of Bled, Slovenia, for the 2nd International Conference for ccTLD Registries and Registrars of CIS, Central and Eastern Europe which was organised by the .ru (Russia) registry.

The conference agenda covered a wide variety of topics and was very interesting. While some of the topics were about policy matters, others covered governance, security, marketing and the aftermarket.

Cctld registry operators ie. the organisations that manage country code domains, have very different ways of working. NASK, which runs .pl, for example, have embraced alternate business models and aren’t afraid of domainers or the aftermarket, which makes a change.

While some domain extensions are completely “open”, others have a variety of restrictions, so the presentations yesterday on how some countries are running their domain spaces was very revealing. Being able to actually speak directly to the people who run registry in person is a lot easier and productive than playing “email ping pong”!

It was also interesting to see how some of them, such as Latvia (.lv) view their role. The Latvian ccTLD operator, for example, has completely revamped their modus operandi in the last couple of years and is now looking at using social media etc., to reach out to its users.
 
From our perspective it was an excellent opportunity to meetup with some of the registry operators we already work with, such as .me (Montenegro), .eu (Eurid) and .mobi (Mtld) while being able to meet new potential partners is always a good thing.

As an English speaker it is all too easy to forget that for many people the Latin character set is completely foreign to them. Countries such as Bulgaria (.bg) are introducing internationalised domain names (IDNs), but they still have the awkward issue of switching from using Cyrillic characters to the Latin set to type in web addresses. So one of the hotter topics for delegates was the introduction of full IDN ccTLDs.

Thanks must go out to the .ru team who not only organised the entire event, but also treated us all like royalty since we got here.

Francesco from dotMobi has also posted an overview of the conference here.