Baku, Azerbaijan, July 14
By Huseyn Valiyev – Trend:
New rules for registration of the national domain contribute to the elimination of the monopoly in the registration of the national ".az" domain and the emergence of new registrants, the Chairman of the Azerbaijan Internet Forum (AIF) Osman Gunduz told Trend.
He said that last year the law "On Telecommunications" of Azerbaijan has undergone some changes, according to which the powers to register the national domain were transferred to the country's Cabinet of Ministers.
“The government was given the authority to prepare the rules for domain registration, which I think is the right decision. I believe that the Cabinet of Ministers will deal with this issue comprehensively and will remove some existing restrictions. I think the government will be able to work out better rules if international experts, industry experts are involved in this process,” Gunduz said.
He further noted that studying international experience here would be useful.
Equally important problem, according to the AIF chairman, is the presence of a monopoly on domain registration.
“The matter is that today registration is conducted by only one company (IntraNS). I believe that the rules that will be prepared by the Cabinet will allow to eliminate this phenomenon and the number of registrants of the national domain will increase and thus a favorable competitive environment will form in the market”, he said.
Currently, more than 30,700 internet resources are registered in the national ".az" domain zone.Of the total number of sites registered in the domain zone, 90.3 of those are the first-level domains.
The ".az" national zone officially began operating on August 25, 1993. The cost of registering the ".az" domain is 20 manats.