International Tech Companies Fall for Fully Cyrillic Domains Fuss in Russia

Only last week registration of the domains in the first fully Cyrillic top-level domain zone began here in Russia – the zone is .рф and the attention it receives from international companies definitely deserves a post.

To prevent cybersquatting, initially only the trademark holders and various government institutions are allowed to apply for their new domains. Registration will only be opened to the general public in April and the prices will be much higher than those in the .ru zone that is currently associated with Russia.

The first websites with URLs typed using Cyrillic alphabet only will emerge online in the first few months of 2010 and in the meanwhile the entire Russia is watching the registration very closely with news being everywhere and even in the prime time TV news. Well, this is a big event given Russian current attention to the web and everything about it so it is no wonder everyone is so focused on it.

Unfortunately the priority registration process for trademarks and government institutions only lasted for one day as it quickly became clear that cybersquatters still made their way into the process as they applied for trademarks containing popular words like sex or bank written in Russian days after they learned the rules for domains registration for trademark owners. This resulted in resetting the entire registration process – stopping it to verify the illegal applications and remove such domains instead.

But still some of the technology companies have been waiting for that single registration day – and had enough time to apply for their new Cyrillic domains and actually have them registered, even though they will be unable to actually use them for some more time.

So the first technology-related company to register a domain with its trademarked name was actually Russian anti-virus company (that happens to be pretty well-known internationally as well) – Kaspersky Lab. Some international companies also readily jumped to the bandwagon of the fully Cyrillic domains: Hewlett Packard registered an awkward Хьюлетт-Паккард.рф that I doubt anyone in their right mind will manage to spell properly from the first attempt anyway in Russian. And do they really own a trademark for that?

Microsoft also registered its Майкрософт.рф domain as they keep insisting in some Russian-language legal documents that the corporation name should be transcribed. No other trademarks owned by Microsoft I could think of have been registered and the only Cyrillic name I could find connected to Microsoft was a transliteration for Vista – registered by some Moscow-based company named Vista. And while I have no idea what field the company actually does business in, I have a feeling that the domain will be an appealing target to sell anyway in the future.

But the hugest surprise for me is Apple: for some reason they could not resist registering a pretty strange-looking transliteration of iPhone (айфон.рф) but somehow preferred to ignore a better readable Macintosh that could probably be at least somewhat useful. And do they really own a trademark for айфон which I thought was a very colloquial version and was only used by Russian bloggers who were lazy to switch keyboard layout?

Other giants seem to prefer to keep silence here as Google is not hurrying to register its Russian version and Microsoft no Yahoo is in sight either. They could probably emerge here once the registration is resumed though I hope they don’t given how funny their domains would have looked in Cyrillic.

The crazy thing about the entire situation is that in order to register a new domain in the .рф zone one needs to own a trademark registered in Russian (so the trademark should actually be written in Cyrillic). And it still makes me wonder if the companies that have registered transliterations of their names in Russian actually have them as the registered trademarks for some reason.

And while the ancient Microsoft and HP could very well have their Russian names actually registered here to protect their businesses, I have huge doubts about Apple and the iPhone – so if my suspicions are true, the crazy Russian iPhone domain could still be taken away from Apple so they will have to bid for it at a public auction in April which will definitely be more expensive (the initial price could be as high as $300k on the first public auction day).