The 57th ICANN meeting is taking place in Hyderabad, India, featuring a session dedicated to the corporation’s policy in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The session, which took place on November 8, was held in Russian for the first time in the history of ICANN conferences. When opening the session, ICANN Vice-President Michael Yakushev emphasized the importance and relevance of this event. He said that Russian is the language of interethnic communication in a region with a population of over 300 million people, and Russian websites rank second in terms of popularity, second only to English-language resources.
Alexandra Kulikova, ICANN Global Stakeholder Engagement Manager for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, talked about ICANN activity, saying that the corporation’s priority is to provide stability, security and reliability of the global identification system and the development of the DNS infrastructure. She said that ICANN is focused on closer interaction will all countries of the region. At the same time, she said, the region is very diverse and cooperation should be built upon a deep understanding of the interests of all parties.
Deputy Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Irina Daneliya delivered a report as a representative of the center and the .ДЕТИ domain name registry whose operational activity she is responsible for. Daneliya also noted the importance of holding a session in Russian, adding that the language barrier remains an obstacle for a more active involvement of representatives from Eastern Europe and Central Asia in ICANN operations. She praised the corporation’s efforts to solve this issue, saying that the quality of translation of ICANN documents into Russian has improved significantly over the past few years. She also spoke about the need to close the gap between ICANN requirements and national laws of the countries in the region, first of all those related to user data protection.
Daneliya also talked about several issues in the ICANN strategy that traditionally draw the most attention: “It is very important for us to understand what the ICANN global strategy is. This is necessary, first of all, to develop a regional strategy. Another important issue is the ICANN strategy on national language domain names. Such a strategy does exist but its results are not yet obvious: this happens mostly because businesses don’t pay any noticeable attention to this subject. In our opinion, it is necessary to hold various special events to involve businesses in this process. I also consider it important to actively involve representatives from various countries in internet governance,” she said.
The same issue was later touched upon by Maxim Alzoba, a representative of the .МОСКВА/.MOSCOW domain registry. He believes that ICANN operations should be joined not only by managers and engineers, but also lawyers from the countries of the region, for this would help compromise on ICANN policies and national laws.
Representatives from Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan also shared their experiences in cooperating with ICANN and made proposals on cooperation improvement. The 57th meeting of ICANN is notable for its focus on what is happening in the domain space of our region and in Russia in particular. Thus, on November 7, Coordination Center Deputy Director Irina Daneliya spoke at a marketing section where she told participants about the center’s statistics project, namely the Russian Domains portal, its capabilities and development directions. Participants in the meeting expressed great interest in this subject.
