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ALL RUSSIAN DOMAIN NAMES TO BE DELETED ON MONDAY.

Any company or person that has a domain name registered in Russia in the '.ru' name space must re-register its domain before Monday, November 1, when the registry in Moscow plans to delete all its 40,000 registered domains and start over. The Russian Institute for Public Networks (RIPN), which

runs the registry, started life inside Moscow University, but apparently was not very careful about maintaining records. So, rather than trying to contact every domain name holder and asking them to re-register, it has decided instead to delete them all and start from scratch. All names in the .ru top-level and .com.ru second-level domains are being deleted and re-registered. The situation is ripe for cybersquatting - the practice of registering names matching famous company names and then charging those companies large amounts of cash to buy the name back. The practice is already fairly common in Russia.

By Nick Patience

The RIPN is apparently not going to issue second-level domains to start with, so companies will only be able to register names like ibm.ru, rather than ibm.com.ru. It's going to wait until the system is stable before introducing second-level names. As the telephone system is not always reliable in Russia, and much of the contact information is out of date due to numbers changing regularly, contacting all the registrant would be impossible anyway. Unfortunately, the Institute has not effectively publicized the problem - there apparently is an announcement on its web site (http://www.ripn.net) but it's in Russian. NetNames Inc, the US unit of the UK domain name registry says it heard about it from its registrants that have names registered in the .ru space. The RIPN does not charge for .com.ru names, but levies a $100 fee for new names in .ru and then $50 to renew annually. Network Solutions Inc said its idNames division, which registers names in most countries, including Russia, was not aware of the problem until contacted by NetNames about it. We contacted the RIPN, but due to time differences, will not get a response until this morning, Thursday.

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