Andrei Kolesnikov, the Coordination Center director, has delivered a speech at the high-level meeting on development of Internet architecture and ICANN Asia-Pacific strategy.
He told the attendees about Russian TLDs, noting that there are 4.5 million domain names in .RU, and the Coordination Center is also responsible for running the largest IDN ccTLD in the world, .РФ, which today has 785,000 domain names.
Andrei Kolesnikov also spoke on Russian Internet industry. “The Internet growth in Russia is now at pace of 38% per year for the past two years. It was never less than this number. And Russia became the largest European Internet market just based on mathematical facts that we have about 140 million citizens and about 3 million users online”, Kolesnikov noted. “We estimate the Internet input into the GDP of Russia, overall, with trade and other things, is 4.2%, which is a lot for the economy if you take into account that the oil, gas and Internet industries are the only industries growing in today’s Russia”.
The Coordination Center director has strongly advocated the role of IANA in today’s global network. “I believe the most critical function of ICANN is the IANA function, because all these economies, all these modern worlds depend on the very basic and simple address function of the domain name system,” Kolesnikov notes. “And when we set up a different priority for the ICANN strategies, we should never forget about the simple and basic function, the IANA. Domain name addressing must work in any conditions, with any regulations or any political situations. Just never forget about this function”.
