ICANN approved the Yandex application for the top-level domain zone .yandex

Today it has become known that ICANN , an international non-profit organization that regulates issues related to domain names on the Internet, has tentatively approved a Yandex application for the first-level domain zone .yandex.

Especially for Habr, we asked the most basic questions about .yandex to the head of NOC Yandex, Vladimir ivlad Ivanov, and the deputy head of the operation department, Tatyana tvt Bakharevskaya.

What does this ICANN decision really mean?

Tatyana : It means that we have passed the stage of Initial Evaluation . Now Yandex needs to sign the Registry Agreement, which will define our relationship with ICANN.
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But this document is not ready yet, it is being discussed by the community:
www.icann.org/en/news/public-comment/base-agreement-29apr13-en.htm

Delegation of this zone will be possible after the signing of this document.

Are there other companies in Russia that have already received the zone?

Tatyana: At the moment, the Initial Evaluation stage has passed the domains: Moscow, children, Rus. But applications are constantly reviewed, so maybe the list has increased during this time.

What did we do to get the zone? Anyone can do this?

Tatyana: It was a great job of the financial and legal department, and Safenames British firm helped us to apply, which has long helped us with domain registrations.
The application is quite expensive - 185 thousand dollars, so, apparently, not everyone.

Will it be possible to make a domain just “yandex”?

Vladimir : Technically, “yandex” is no different from, for example, “com” or “ru”. In practice, a significant proportion of resolvers, not detecting a point in the domain name, believes that it is a host in the local zone and is trying to turn to such a host. For example, if a user has a local provider.ru zone, then when he tries to access “yandex”, in reality, the appeal will most likely be to “yandex.provider.ru”. To prevent this from happening, the root zone needs to be recorded as “yandex.” - then everything works.

Why is it Yandex? What is going to be there?

Tatyana: As we have said, we are planning to use a top-level domain for ourselves. On .yandex there will be the same information: search, our services, information about Yandex. If over time people get used to using top-level domains, it will be convenient for them to access Yandex via .yandex.

Vladimir : We will first see how your own tld will generally be perceived by users. And check what problems will be with the software.

We take it very seriously. For example, in order to check everything out early, we raised our TLD .tyndex a year ago to test life with it. If all goes well, we will post our services there. It is very interesting how mail can work with these zones.

Technically, in the near future, the zone will be supported by NeuStar .