Are the Russians missing their own best opportunity?
Some time ago, I surveyed a group of Russian websites using top English keywords and Russian translations as a guide. I wondered at the lack of real English content and also grew concerned that my antivirus and scanning software couldn’t navigate the niceties of Russian code. Few sites impressed me.
Pursuant to yesterday’s post, I noticed an article regarding the enforcement of .ru domains. The legal reasons for these domains is for Russian organizations, companies, corporations, and personal and hobby sites. But domainers have kept a weather eye on the sudden swath of lawmaking regarding foreign country code domains.
Russian as its own governing body of .ru foes have the right to restrict its brand property. But the global domain name market was happening long before .ru was a glimmer on the horizon. The attempt to rewrite the book on the domain market seems more than a bit single-sided. The so-called enforcement is less than productive to domainers. The trading market for all online domain name real estate belongs to active traders accessible to all markets.
Starting April 1, anyone who registers a .ru domain will need to provide a copy of their passport or, for businesses, legal registration papers. Right now, .ru domains can be set up with no verification. Although this practice that has allowed scammers to quickly set up .ru domains under bogus names, there’s no reason to believe the same types of people won’t endeavor to get phony passports.
It follows that Russian companies and individuals will be held to a higher standard of legitimizing domain names and urls than “casual” domainers. Yet isn’t the casual domain owner market what drives the potential trading value of any domain name? How can Russian businessmen and entrepreneurs hope to realize profit from their biggest tranche of .ru name buyers (and visitors) if their governing body is cutting it off at the knees?
The .ru crackdown is supposedly to help prevent fraud and inappropriate website production. This brings the bugaboo of censors ship into the fray. Yet the adult market and scam sites happen despite the best efforts of hosting companies and registrars to stop them. Cease and desist letters take thirty days and the most adept fraudsters won’t be limited by a mere tld restriction. Even China is learning that lesson the hard way.
Russia and China are nations which have similar cultural backbones. The Communist agenda and the weight of propaganda inside the traditions of business and collective organized enterprises. Modern business practices, especially those loaded with technical overtones like Internet media, do not occur there as naturally as they do in the West.
But Russia and China have begun to order their Internet practices with a heavy hand. “Western” domainers have long been watching all the international markets and country codes for potential in the name markets.
The recent adoption of non-Latin character sets in domain names has been a drastic development. But what has long surprised me is that the Russian insistence on the native character sets aligns their Internet usage to an isolationist market. China has been doing much the same thing, for another instance of isolationist policy. But this may not be for their own good.
Both Russia and China face their profit models outward toward foreign markets. But for a closed culture of Chinese or Russian character alphabet names, the market shrinks rapidly. Just trying to host and load a site in another language is hit and miss for many domainers. So, is the Russian internet web industry legislating for domestic use or international use?
The new rule would assert that only Russian people can best utilize Russian domain names. So, it would seem then that the best search engine results for Russian information searches are still for English speaking users and browsers, because accessing the Russian language and .ru network may be more lingually challenging than most casual internet users can handle.
So, if the .ru powers that be (and the China internet body as well) keep the native language for the local online real estate, then are they really taking advantage of their own online markets, or are they leaving them vulernable to actual usage English speaking users worldwide? Confining the local domestic internet to stunted growth and limited access media will bite the hand that holds it back, leaving the traffic to others.
Russia has not yet instituted the ‘Big Brother” tracking and controls that China has for internet usage, but that may not be far behind. For domestic Russian and Chinese users, their governments will have effectively cut off the global roaming privileges the rest of the world enjoys. And by putting a language barrier between its host webmasters and foreign visitor potential, the Western domainer once more enjoys hegemony online.
So, webmasters and domainers, by your Russian and Chinese enterprise names. Build the sites and create the online experiences to match. Because online browsers flow to where the grass is greener, and the big green looks to be staying in the free domain market.
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