The Meeting of Domain Industry Representatives from Eastern Europe – Central Asia region (DOMINO-2015), which has become traditional, was held near Moscow. It was organized by the Russian Technical Center of Internet. It was both pleasant (as always, organizers brought joy and held remarkable informal events and team-building exercises ;) ) and useful – business part of the agenda was extremely interesting.
A lot of representatives arrived there from all kinds of domains, both country code (ccTLD) and new gTLD. Obviously, domains were different, but problems and prospects for each registry have appeared to be rather similar.
Many words (and mainly pleasant) were told about ICANN. On the one hand, the New gTLD Program launch a few years ago revealed unpreparedness for expansive (in tens of times) growth of generic domains number. On the other hand, application handling and domain support procedures have been refined during the last years; any arising issues are resolved in the normal course of business.
A completely new services market has been created after the launch of the New gTLD Program — In most cases, new domains are supported by professional backend providers. Changes in clients' needs have direct impact on relationships between registrars and such providers (for example, when higher service efficiency is required). It is a very positive sign.
Professional technical centers will play an important role, apparently. Their further development will depend on both the success (and needs) of the new domains registries and the new services, which registrars will offer to their clients.
It is expected that discussion will continue at the annual conference TLDCON, which will be held September 8th-11th in Yerevan.
See you!