At the ICANN 50 Meeting in London, Foundation for Assistance for Internet Technologies and Infrastructure Development (FAITID) signed the .МОСКВА and .MOSCOW Registry-Registrar Agreements with seven large international registrars: 101 DOMAIN, ASCIO, BB-ONLINE, GANDI, KEY-SYSTEMS, MARKMONITOR, LEXSYNERGY. They all will start domain name registration within the Sunrise period for owners of trademarks included in the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH), which launched June 10.

This week, the registrars are expected to complete the Operational Test and Evaluation and get the access to the registries of .МОСКВА and .MOSCOW. After that, they will be able to offer their customers domain name registration services in Moscow's TLDs. The first registrars to be accredited for .МОСКВА and .MOSCOW were Russian companies RU-CENTER, R01 Registrar, REG.RU, and Webnames.

"We are happy that .МОСКВА and .MOSCOW domain names will be registered by the largest Russian and international registrars. From the very beginning, Moscow’s domains have become available for users both in Russia and worldwide. The right of priority registration during the Sunrise and Limited registration periods was given to both Moscow's trademark owners and global international brands," said Dmitry Burkov, Chairman of the Board of the Foundation for Assistance for Internet Technologies and Infrastructure Development (Registry Operator of .MOSCOW and .МОСКВА).

.MOSCOW and .МОСКВА will have several registration periods. July 15, 2014, registration will become available for owners of trademarks protected in the Russian Federation. August 19 is the start of the registration period for owners of Moscow's trade names and names of non-profit organizations and mass media outlets, as well as for owners of appellations of origin registered in Moscow and Moscow Region.

Landrush will open September 24, 2014. During this two-month period registration will be available for everyone, but at higher prices. Open registration at standard prices (General Availability) will start December 1, 2014.

Sunrise registration period for owners of trademarks included in the TMCH is now in progress. During the first two weeks, FAITID received about fifty registration applications for domain names matching global brands. Among them are some luxury brands (Rolex, Tudor, Chanel), tourism services (Expedia, TripAdvisor, Hotwire, etc.), software and hardware developer Apple Inc., as well as a few Russian trademark owners.

The Geographic Top-Level Domain Stakeholder Group (GeoTLDs) held a meeting on the first day of the ICANN 50. It was attended by the representatives of organizations introducing top-level domains for cities and regions (including .МОСКВА and .MOSCOW) under the New gTLD Program. They discussed the first results of registration launch in the cities' TLDs. Members of the GeoTLDs Group believe that Moscow's domains will experience a rapid growth of registrations after the launch of General Availability. This assumption is based on statistics of pre-orders received by registrars and on the success of .BERLIN. Just one week after the start of General Availability, the number of registered domains increased by 50,000 and now totals 116,000. Because of such growth, .BERLIN is now the second largest new gTLD by the number of registrations.