Our contacts in Russia got back to us yesterday to clarify the situation with that country’s domain name registry, which is set to overhaul its system starting next week and re-register every one of its 40,000 domains in the .ru space (10/29/98). They tell us that the news has been known in Russia for some time, although the announcement at (http://www.ripn.net/nic/dns/info_23.09.1998.txt) is still only in Russian. They said that many of the biggest domain name holders have already re-registered and paid for their domains, which could previously be registered for free. But for those that haven’t, they’d better do it today because the system changes on Sunday. The administrator of the registry, Alexei Platonov has not got back to us yet. The situation is bad in Russia, they tell us, but no worse than usual.
