The 69th Annual General Meeting of the Asia Pacific Top Level Domain Association (APTLD) opened in Auckland, New Zealand, on February 18, bringing together representatives of national registries from Asia-Pacific, Europe, as well as from international organizations. The Coordination Center for TLD RU joined APTLD as a member in 2010, and in 2012 hosted its meeting in Moscow.
The main topics on the agenda of the 69th APTLD General Meeting were the development of national domains, domain space security, including protection of national domains from DDoS attacks, hardware requirements for the DNS infrastructure, and the impact of various factors on traditional domains, such as the new gTLDs, rapid development of social media platforms, and the advent of the Internet of Things. All these developments increase competition among TLDs and are serious financial and economic challenges for national domains. The meeting provided participants with an opportunity to exchange views on how to keep growing in an increasingly challenging environment, and offer solutions to deal with the issues they are facing.
The Coordination Center for TLD RU is one of the biggest domain administrators within APTLD. In his remarks at the meeting, Coordination Center Director Andrey Vorobyev said that the .RU domain had over 5 million domain names at the end of 2015, and shared some recipes for success. He also talked on the changes in the administration of Russian national domains, whereby the list of the Coordination Center’s founding members was expanded to include the Russian Ministry of Communications and Mass Media and the Institute of Internet Development, an organization that brings together more than 1,000 Runet experts. Andrey Vorobyev went on to say that the increase in the number of founders has positively affected the development of Russian domains and ensured that public interests regarding the national domain space are respected. “With these founding members, we are able to balance the interests of all stakeholders and work for the public good,” he pointed out. In addition, the Coordination Center Director presented a memorandum on the development of the Russian domain space that has been recently signed between the Coordination Center for TLD RU, the Technical Center of Internet and MSK-IX exchange point. This memorandum is aimed at enhancing trust, without which Internet would not exist, Andrey Vorobyev said.
Apart from presentations and roundtable discussions, APTLD meetings also provide an opportunity to hold business meetings. During the first day of the forum, Russian and Chinese national domain administrators held official talks to discuss IDN domain development and efforts to combat violations involving Russian and Chinese national domains. In fact, Chinese and Russian registries regularly meet to exchange experience and work together on overcoming issues they face.
