EPP in Ukrainian domains
For the first timedraft EPP specification(Extensible Provisioning Protocol) was presented to the public in November 2000 by Scott Hollenbeck (Verisign Inc.), and published in March 2004.the first official description of the protocol.
The EPP protocol is the best tool for interaction between registrars and domain registries. It enables automated processing of all operations related to domain delegation and registration information management, and provides additional protection against domain theft.
At the end of 2006, the most popular .COM and .NET domains began using the so-called EPP code (transfer code) when transferring domains from one registrar to another. This innovation significantly reduced the incidence of domain theft.
Today, EPP is also used by: .aero, .asia, .at, .biz, .cat, .cc, .co, .eu, .fm, .fr, .im, .in, .info, .io, .it, .jobs, .kz, .la, .li, .me, .mobi, .name, .no, .nu, .nz, .org, .pl, .pro, .ru, .sh, .su, .tel, .tm, .travel, .tv, .uk, .us, .vc, .za and many others.
The birth of EPP in Ukraine can be considered to be March 2009, when the company “Service Online” (DRS.UA) has opened registration for the free .PP.UA domain. All domain transactions have been handled exclusively through EPP from the very beginning. Additionally, for domain registration.PP.UAFor the first time in the CIS, the SMS confirmation procedure was used.
In the first month since its launch, more than 6,000 domains were registered under this domain, and by the end of the year, .PP.UA already had almost 30,000 domains. In total, more than 130,000 .PP.UA domains have been registered since March 2009.
Following the successful launch of EPP in the .PP.UA domain, Service Online began testing the protocol in the .CO.UA and .BIZ.UA domains, and on July 1, 2010, these domains fully transitioned to the new system. Furthermore, the CUNIC contact database, which is used in these domains and in the .PP.UA domain,officially registered in the IANA EPP repository.
Today, .CO.UA has about 6 thousand domains, and .BIZ.UA has 8 thousand.
A year and a few months later, in November 2011, Hostmaster (administrator of .UA and other Ukrainian domains) launchedA pilot project to transfer domains to the Poltava region(.POLTAVA.UA and .PL.UA) to a new scheme of interaction with registrars, namely, using EPP.
The main challenge in transitioning our regional domains to the new system is that EPP is incompatible with the UANIC database they use. Therefore, domain owners must select a registrar and work with them to verify and update their domain owner information. Domains that fail to complete the registrar selection process within the established deadline are deleted.
44 Ukrainian registrars (25%) participated in the project, and the number of domains in Poltava domains increased by one and a half times to 11.6 thousand (of which 9.3 thousand were in .PL.UA).
Following the successful completion of the pilot project, the domains of Ivano-Frankivsk, Uzhgorod, and Chernivtsi switched to the new operating scheme on September 1, 2012. The administrator of these domains and the domains of Poltava became the company "Hostmaster".
In addition, ignoring the change in users collected by the initiative«Змінимо .ORG.UA», the company "Hostmaster" announced the transition of the .ORG.UA domain to EPP (with an unjustified change of administrator and the introduction of a fee for the domain) from November 16, 2012.
During 2013, such large domains as .kiev.ua and .com.ua, as well as several regional ones, switched to EPP.
So, as of today, the following Ukrainian domains operate under EPP:
- .pp.ua — since March 2009
- .co.ua, .biz.ua — since July 2010
- .com.ua, .org.ua, .kiev.ua, .chernigov.ua and .cn.ua, .chernovtsy.ua and .cv.ua, .cherkassy.ua and .cherkasy.ua and .ck.ua, .ivano-frankivsk.ua and .if.ua, kherson.ua and .ks.ua, .khmelnitskiy.ua and .km.ua, .poltava.ua and .pl.ua, .rovno.ua and .rv.ua, .uzhgorod.ua and .uz.ua, .zhitomir.ua and .zt.ua
