Delegations from 14 countries and international corporations, such as Google and Microsoft, attended the Asia Pacific Top Level Domain Association (APTLD) members’ meeting in Muscat, Oman, in mid-May.
Russia was represented by a delegation of the Coordination Center for TLD RU/РФ, led by the center’s head, Andrei Kolesnikov. CC for TLD RU/РФ joined the APTLD in 2010 and in 2012, organized an APTLD meeting in Moscow.
APTLD General Manager Don Hollander said in his opening address: “The Middle East is an important and growing part of our community, and the issues that we are talking about at the meeting, IDNs, are very relevant to the region.”
Mohammed Al-Kindi, executive manager of the Regulatory and Compliance Unit at Oman’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA), focused on the achievements of Oman’s country code top level domain (ccTLD), .om, and the importance of such meetings where you can discuss and share global concerns.
The meeting participants also discussed Internet governance, which became a major concern after the US government announced its plans to back away from the management of the Internet’s domain name system (DNS). Another key issue they discussed was the development of internationalized domain names (IDN) that can contain letters or characters from non-Latin scripts.
Since this is a major issue in the Asia-Pacific region, the participants showed considerable interest in Andrei Kolesnikov’s report on the Russian experience of promoting its .РФ domain, titled “.РФ: The Success Factors.” The issues he covered and Russia’s achievements in the development of its ccTLDs were included in the Oman meeting’s final communiqué.
