.RU/.РФ Domains Registry Fee Increasing By 71% In July

The registry fee for .RU and .РФ domain names is increasing to 120 rubles from the current 70 rubles, an increase of 71%, the registry, the Coordination Center for TLD RU, announced, the first increase in 10 years.

The increase applies to registration and renewals from 1 July and was approved at a meeting of the Council of the Coordination Center for TLD .ru/.рф on 27 February. This increase, the CCTLDRU says, comes as no surprise to most people who are involved in this market: there has been talk about the need to raise prices since 2012. The cost of domain name registration and renewal in the .RU domain has not changed since 2007. The cost of the domain name registration and renewal in .РФ in 2011 equalled the cost in the .RU.

There are currently 5.523 million .ru domains and 901,000 .рф domains under management.

A survey by the CCTLDRU found that there would not be any serious decrease in the number of registered domain names. The price increase will mostly affect small low-margin registrars that provide services to domain investors.

Council members from the registrar community said that the price increase would improve the working conditions of the registrars and contribute to holding major marketing programs to promote the Russian national domains .RU and .РФ, as well as modernizing the infrastructure and developing the registration system.

Andrei Vorobyov spoke about the control of prices set by registrars: “Together with the Regional Public Center for Internet Technologies, we are launching a public control mechanism to monitor prices for domain names. It is very important to prevent our registrars, who have doubled retail prices in the past few years, from passing this negligible (as compared to the final price) increase to their clients.”

The council also approved the Regulation on the Stabilization Fund of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ and decided to allocate part of the undistributed profits of the past years to its creation. The fund will create financial reserves for emergency situations that can affect the stable and safe operation of the Russian domain space. The council also discussed and approved decisions on other issues.