On 20 June, ICANN’s 38 International Meeting has opened in Brussels. Representatives of the European Parliament, the European Union, the European Registry (EURid), as well as Vice President of the European Commission in charge of the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, have spoken at the opening session.
In his welcoming address, Rod Beckstrom, President of ICANN, has emphasized an important event in global Internet that is the successful launch of the first four IDNs, including the Cyrillic one - ccTLD .РФ.
Mr. Beckstrom has called ccTLD .RU one of the fastest growing top-level domains in Europe. This is small wonder: 3 million domain names are going to be registered in the Russian top-level domain shortly and at the same time annual growth rates remain at high level.
Andrey Kolesnikov, Director of the Coordination Center for ccTLD .RU, congratulated countries to which IDNs in their primary languages have also been delegated and stressed that “the ICANN is the largest Internet Corporation and in spite of the rapid growth of the global Internet, it always remained democratic and open for all stakeholders concerned. Today, governments and big-time politics start playing a significant role in Internet governance. Even the opening session of the meeting turned out to be somewhat formal this time. I remain hopeful the ICANN will succeed with retaining its unique spirit and genuinely democratic management structure which takes into account opinions of all the major stakeholders: government, business, non-governmental organizations, developers, and the community at-large.”
