The court found Ru-Center not guilty of violations in the registration of .РФ domains.
The Moscow Arbitration Court upheld the FAS decision, which found Russia's largest registrar, Ru-Center, guilty of violating the law during the registration of domain names in the Cyrillic domain .РФ.
According to the FAS decision, Regional Network Information Center (Ru-Center) CJSC was found guilty of violating the law when registering domains in the .РФ zone and ordered to pay 239.36 million rubles in revenue to the state budget.
In November 2010, free domain registration for the Cyrillic domain .РФ began. Anyone could apply for free registration, provided they had signed an agreement with one of 20 registrars and submitted their registration request through them.
The Coordination Center for TLD RU imposed a limitation, limiting each registrar to processing no more than 4,800 applications per hour. To circumvent this limitation, some registrars merged. In July of this year, the Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia found Ru-Center guilty of unfair competition and collusion aimed at redistributing the domain name registration market. In addition to Ru-Center, charges were brought against the following companies: ANO Regional Network Information Center, Relcom. Business Network LLC, Demos-Internet CJSC, Registrar CJSC, and Elvis-Telecom CJSC.
Furthermore, the FAS accused the company of holding domain auctions for "pretty" domains. The antimonopoly service accused the company of registering domains with commonly used names and then holding auctions for these domains.
Ru-Center believed that auctions were the most optimal way to distribute "nice" domains when several registrants were applying for a domain.
In defending its position, Ru-Center also stated that there was no agreement between the registrars, and that Ru-Center, as a regular client, also contacted other registrars and entered into regular client agreements with them.
The company's lawyer also noted that the law does not prohibit the registration of domain names that, in particular, represent commonly used words.
Following the Moscow Arbitration Court's decision, representatives of the Federal Antimonopoly Service of the Russian Federation announced that they would appeal the court's decision to the appellate court.
