Ru-Center has completed the auction of domains in the .рф zone.
Alexey Lesnikov, CEO of Ru-Center, announced that the company has completed the sale of second-level domain names in the .РФ zone at closed auctions.
Around 24,000 domain names in the .РФ zone were sold during the auctions. The auctions included names for which more than one bidder was involved. On average, each domain sold for around 15,000 rubles.
But there were also names with record prices of several million rubles. The most expensive domain sold for 15 million rubles. Ru-Center representatives are not disclosing which name fetched such a high price.
Ru-Center owns another 500 domains that failed to sell at auction because the winners refused to buy them. The company's management is currently unsure what to do with these domains.
256 names were withdrawn from auction and transferred to the owners of trademarks of the same name or to municipal authorities (in cases where, for example, the name corresponded to the name of a locality).
As a reminder, in January 2010, the Coordination Center for TLD RU demanded that Ru-Center cease holding auctions. The commission investigating the incident concluded that the registrar violated domain registration rules by putting some names up for auction.
Lesnikov believes the conflict will be resolved if Ru-Center transfers information about the actual administrators (currently, all domain names sold at auctions are registered with Ru-Center) to the Internet Technical Center (the administrator of the .РФ domain zone). However, he noted that this is currently impossible, as open registration for the .РФ domain began with restrictions. Specifically, changing the domain administrator is prohibited for one year.
According to Andrey Kolesnikov, director of the Criminal Center, this rule cannot be repealed. The Criminal Center is currently considering options to resolve the current situation and plans to make a final decision by March 1. The Prosecutor General's Office recently expressed interest in holding the auction.
Currently, over 750,000 names are registered in the .РФ domain, and more than half of them have already been delegated. However, according to registrar R01, websites exist on only 20% of delegated .РФ domain names.
