On December 13, Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency hosted the traditional annual conference Runet 2017: Results of the Year, organized by the Russian Association for Electronic Communications (RAEC). The agenda included eight key studies of the internet industry conducted in 2017.
RAEC Director Sergei Plugotarenko presented the main study of the year, The Economy of Runet/Digital Economy Ecosystem of Russia, which was conducted in partnership with the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ. The research covers all the segments of the Russian market where added value is created through digital (information) technologies. Today, RAEC analytics estimate the input of digital economy into Russia’s general economy at 2.1 percent of the GDP and of mobile economy at 3.8 percent of the GDP. The total input makes up 4.35 trillion rubles, or 5.06 percent of the GDP.
Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrey Vorobyev spoke about Russian national domains developments in 2017. “This has been a year of restructuring, of ‘sanitizing’ our domain zones. On July 1, wholesale prices were raised for registration and renewal of domain names. Large registrars chose not to raise the retail cost of domain names whereas the so-called ‘domain investors’ refused to renew part of the names in their portfolios. The rate of growth in the number of registrations in the .RU zone remains very high. According to CENTR, .RU retains the third position by the growth rate in Europe as followed by .UK and .DE. Our forecast is that by the end of 2018, the growth dynamics of the Russian national domain zones .RU and .РФ will become positive again,” he said. Vorobyev noted that the number of registered DNS zones managing from one to 10 names has been rising steadily over the recent months. This indicates that domains have been transferred from investors’ portfolios to the hands of endpoint users.
The Director of the Coordination Center also talked about the work of relevant organizations and new studies the center conducted. Among them is the current review of registered trademarks that match domain names in the zones .RU and .РФ, implemented by the Center together with the OnlinePatent company. Preliminary results have proved that a significant number of trademark owners haven’t registered the corresponding domains.
At the end of the conference’s top panel, results of the competition Positive Content were summarized. Experts and representatives of non-profit organizations and business discussed the issue of “positive content” within the Russian internet segment (Runet) as well as problems which users report via Runet’s hotline. During the roundtable discussion, representatives of the organizing committee and competition's winners agreed to create a knowledge database on the website of the competition, which will be updated with content of all the winners. “This will both be a good platform for experience exchange and also a powerful incentive to provide new resources with positive content,” Andrey Vorobyev said.
At the end of Runet 2017: Results of the Year, a session of the RAEC cluster on blockchain and crypto currency took place. It included a presentation and discussion of the dictionary Terms and Definitions Necessary for Law Regulation in Crypto Currencies and Blockchain Technologies. The session involved Dmitry Afanasyev, legal adviser to the director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ. “Compiling a terminological dictionary in crypto currency is a key condition for taking up development of regulatory mechanisms. We are at the very start of this road,” he noted.
