This registration phase is open only to Departments of the Russian State and trademark holders in order for them to secure their brands and protect them from cybersquatters [ cough-cough ].

According to an article which appeared on mail.ru, State agencies need to apply for their domain by sending a request directly to the registry, while Brand holders need to send the necessary paperwork identifying their brand-s to their registrar and if all papers are in order they proceed with the registration. Registrars started accepting applications on November 16th and it is reported that 3,000 applications have been received during this week, with half of them being rejected due to incomplete or inaccurate data.

The article further state that registration for State agencies is free while for Mark holders the cost is 1200 Rubles, which is a little less expensive than peanuts.

The State reserved a bunch of names on November 24th, such as россия.рф, гимн.рф, герб.рф, флаг.рф, конституция.рф, as Scilla.ru reports. The same source states that the domain блог.рф [blog.rf] is also reserved which is somewhat questionable as to why the Government feels this name should be ‘protected’.

I’ve checked a couple of names and it was interesting to see секс.рф [sex] registered and порно.рф [porn] isn’t.I guess no Russian company has porn as its mark..

музыка [music] is also registered but other killer terms such as Гостиницы [hotels] and Видео.рф [video] are still open as of this writing.

Won’t be long before they’re gone, me thinks. My guess is that when the sunrise period opens up with the already known auction-style format, the registry will have a hard time selling off the better domains for 1 million rubles each on the first day; simply because there won’t be any…

ICANN’t is about to unleash the icctlds [ idn cctlds] with .рф out of the gates first, which should enhance IDN awareness resulting in a nice ‘explosion’ in Cyrillic domain traffic to say the least. Long awaited by IDN domain investors, the creation of  .рф and other Iternational Country Code tlds should pump some juice to the otherwise flat IDN domain market.