Sunrise Registration Period Begins for .РФ

Russian registrar RU Center has begun accepting applications for domain names under .РФ, the Cyrillic country-code top-level domain for Russian Federation. Following a four-month sunrise registration period for trademark owners that began on November 25, 2009, registration will open to general public, first through an auction process planned between April and June 2010, and then at a fixed price, beginning July 2010. The domain names will be in the Russian language, using the Cyrillic alphabet. During the sunrise period, instead of granting registrations on a first-come, first-served basis, the registrar will consider applicants' underlying trademark registrations and give priority to holder of the earlier registration. Thus, if there are two identical registrations in different classes, and both owners have applied for the corresponding .РФ domain name, holder of the earlier-issued registration will prevail. The domain is still pending final approval by ICANN and the delegation is not expected until February 2010 at the earliest.