What is in my domain for you – Newspaper Kommersant No. 8 (7453) dated 01/18/2023

By the end of 2022, the number of .ru domains dropped below 5 million, more than 250 thousand individuals and individual entrepreneurs ceased to be their administrators. Both many non-residents and investors refused to own domains. At the same time, the .rf and .su zones stopped their decline for the first time in six years. Experts note that the future dynamics of indicators will primarily depend on the economic activity of business in the Russian Federation.

Kommersant got acquainted with the statistics of the Internet Technical Center (TCI, maintains the main registries of .ru, .rf, .su domains) on the change in the number of domains in 2022.

The number of .ru domains during the year decreased by 88.2 thousand, to 4.93 million.

The .рф and .su spaces (originally allocated to the Soviet Union, now have the status of “exclusively reserved”) for the first time since 2016 grew in a year, albeit symbolically – by 1308 (up to 676.2 thousand domains) and 514 (up to 105.9 thousand), respectively. During 2021, the number of .rf domains decreased by 36.8 thousand, the number of .su domains – by 3.4 thousand.

The decline in the rate of registration of .ru domains is associated with the departure of foreign players from the Russian market, and the growth of interest in .rf and .su domains is due to the “search for alternatives to domains in international zones,” said Marina, head of the department of domains and related services at Ru-Center, to Kommersant Brik. In the .ru zone, the share of domain names registered by non-residents is traditionally high, Andrey Vorobyov, director of the .RU/.RF Coordination Center, clarifies:

“Some domain owners were able to transfer domains for support to other registrars. But the proportion of those who refused further use is large.

After the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, the world’s largest registrar, GoDaddy, stopped reselling and processing registrations of .ru domains, and the 101domains service did the same. Namecheap, Bluehost and Ionos registrars have limited or stopped working with clients from the Russian Federation. Engaging with companies that did not announce such measures made cross-border payment problems more difficult.

Economic difficulties are also reflected in the statistics of the .ru zone – in particular, “a decrease in the number of administrators among small and medium-sized businesses,” Mr. Vorobyov added.

According to the TCI, over the year the number of domains registered for individuals and individual entrepreneurs decreased by 258 thousand, to 3.64 million (73.8% of the total).

The number of domains registered for legal entities grew by 170,000 over the year, to 1.28 million (26.1%).

The .ru zone was also affected by a change in demand from those who register and buy domains for the purpose of selling, one of these investors Pavel Gross-Dneprov believes: “Domainers revised their portfolio and got rid of the least interesting assets.” Names in the .рф and .su zones, he says, “usually register the real business that has provided the growth.”

Companies, including foreign ones, often set up separate domains for each advertising and promotional campaign, Karen Kazarian, CEO of the Internet Research Institute, said: “The number of domain registrations is an indicator of economic activity.” Further dynamics, according to him, will correlate precisely with this activity.

During 2022, the Ministry of Digital Transformation instructed government agencies to switch to using Russian domain name servers (see “Kommersant” dated March 6, 2022), and also obligated officials to create official e-mail addresses only in the national domain space. Some growth in the number of .rf and .su domains “can be attributed to these and similar measures,” says a Kommersant source in the telecommunications industry. At the same time, he noted that it is too early to build any trends: “For this, you need to see changes at least by a few percent.”

Yuri Litvinenko