The Asia Pacific Top Level Domain Association (APTLD) met in Oman on May 11-13, bringing together representatives of national registries from 14 Asian Pacific countries. Russia’s Coordination Center for TLD RU/РФ has been a member of APTLD since 2010. The association’s 60th Members’ Meeting was held in Moscow in 2012, with the Coordination Center hosting this major regional event.
Interest in the Asia Pacific region grows with each passing year. In 2014, representatives of many leading international organizations and global corporations, such as Google and Microsoft, attended the APTLD meeting to discuss national domain registries and their interactions with international organizations.
A focus of the meeting was the emergence of Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) and their role and place among the world's top-level domain names. Director of the Coordination Center Andrei Kolesnikov used the example of the Cyrillic domain .РФ to talk about the future of IDN domains. He shared his experience of developing a Russian-language domain and discussed several marketing techniques that have been used to promote the .РФ domain.
Another focus of the APTLD meeting was the changing environment in Internet governance, in particular, the U.S. government’s recent announcement that it would seek to transfer the IANA function to the international Internet community. APTLD General Manager Don Hollander stressed that properly structured Internet governance is essential for the continued growth of top-level domains, and that such meetings are a chance for all participating countries to express their views and discuss the issues at hand.
