RU-CENTER will defend its clients' interests in court.
RU-CENTER published a statement on its official website stating that Regional Network Information Center (RNIC) JSC disagrees with the findings of the Coordination Center for TLD RU commission, which stated that the company's actions during the first days of open registration could be characterized as abuse. As a reminder, RNIC is a trademark of RU-CENTER.
This statement was a response to the findings of the Coordination Center's commission on domain name registration in the .РФ domain, released yesterday. As is known, the commission found the registration of several thousand domain names by RU-CENTER to be in violation of the Russian Civil Code and the rules for registering domain names in the .РФ domain. The commission concluded that the mass registration of 60,000 domain names for the purpose of subsequent "resale" and holding internal closed auctions constituted abuse.
However, RU-CENTER claims no domain hijacking took place. The company claimed to have registered 170 domains for itself, while the rest were registered at the request of clients.
Clients submitted preliminary applications from September 21 to November 10, 2010. A total of 135,000 applications were received. If two or more applications were received for a single domain, the domain was registered to the registrar, and a closed auction was held among the applicants for the right to own the domain name.
RU-CENTER representatives believe the commission simply wants to tarnish the company's business reputation, and that it referred to the normal fulfillment of contractual obligations to clients as a "seizure."
However, the commission's decision states that holding closed internal auctions during registration violates the rules for registering domain names in the .РФ domain, and RU-CENTER ignored the rule prohibiting administrator changes within one year of domain name registration and introduced the "domain name ownership" service. However, users were not informed that additional information about domain name owners was entered into RU-CENTER's internal registry, not into the Main Registry of Domain Names for the .РФ national domain.
The Coordination Center has no information about domain owners and has no relationship with them. If ZAO RSIC ceases operations, the center will be unable to defend users. However, the registration of these domains cannot be cancelled, as this would be contrary to the interests of the end users who purchased these domains at auction.
On January 26, a meeting was held to summarize the results of the commission's work. The Council of the Coordination Center for the National Internet Domain instructed the center's director, A. Kolesnikov, to prepare and submit to the council proposals for eliminating violations of the rules for registering domain names in the .RF domain by March 1, 2011.
