National Domain Name System Sees Record User Growth

MOSCOW, 25 Aug — PRIME. The number of Russian users of the national domain name system (NCDI) increased from January to July to 1 million per day, follows from a study by the Federal State Unitary Enterprise “Main Radio Frequency Center” (GRCHTs).

In May 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law aimed at protecting the stable operation of the Internet in the event of a threat to its functioning from abroad. The document, in particular, provides for the installation on the networks of telecom operators of technical means of monitoring compliance with legislation on restricting access to illegal information. Such equipment must be provided to operators by the State. The law also provides for the creation of NCDI, which duplicates the current domain name scheme. The system began to work from January 1, 2021.

“NCDI shows a positive trend in the growth of Russian users. So, from January to July of this year, their number increased by 200 thousand (from 800 thousand to 1 million per day), and in total about 13 billion requests are received per day. This is about 6% of global number of requests to DNS servers,” the message says.

According to the Center for Monitoring and Management of the Public Communications Network (TsMU SSOP), the maximum number of requests to NCDI comes from the Central Federal District (58%), the North-Western Federal District is in second place (9%), and the Siberian Federal District is in third (eight%).

It is noted that in the first half of 2022, search services, mail, and social networks remained the most popular resources among users: Yandex search service (4.1 billion requests), Mail.ru mail (791 million requests), social networks VK (217 million requests) and Odnoklassniki (122 million requests).

“A large number of unique requests indicates a high degree of trust in the system. Telecom operators and ordinary users understand the need for the measures introduced … Users (mainly in the business segment) understand the risks associated with using foreign DNS services and switch to the domestic system,” noted Deputy Director of the CMU SSOP Denis Glazunov.