On September 20-21, Tashkent (Uzbekistan) hosted the 74th meeting of the Asia Pacific Top Level Domain Association, the APTLD 74 Members Meeting. The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ was a partner of the event, and the center's experts took an active part in its work.
This year, APTLD is marking its 20th anniversary, APTLD Director Leonid Todorov said at the opening of the conference. The first day of APTLD began with a business breakfast attended by Minister for the Development of Information Technologies and Communications of the Republic of Uzbekistan Shukhran Sadykov, Director of UZINFOCOM (the domain registry for .UZ) Dzhalolotdin Rakhimov and APTLD Board Chair Ai-chin Lu. Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrey Vorobyev also participated. During the breakfast, Andrey Vorobyev and Shukhran Sadykov discussed internet development in Russia and Uzbekistan and outlined ways of possible cooperation in this area. Andrey Vorobyev offered consultancy to his Uzbek colleagues in organizing their own internet governance initiatives and IPv6 Day events to be held in Uzbekistan in the future. All participants were invited to Russia for events to be hosted by the Coordination Center in 2018 and 2019, including the EE DNS Forum in December 2018 in Moscow and APrIGF in July 2019 in Vladivostok.
Representatives of the Coordination Center took part in two sessions during the first day of the conference. During the first session, the participants analyzed a situation that could occur if an accredited registrar goes out of business, specifically the technical and legal difficulties that domain administrators may face if that happens. Sergey Kopylov, deputy director of the Coordination Center and head of the legal department, spoke about the technical and administrative practices the Russian registry applies in such cases, as well as the information system for users that ensures the continuous operation of domains.
Mikhail Anisimov, deputy head of the Coordination Center's Department of External Communications, spoke at the second session devoted to the development of IDN domains and the Universal Acceptance program. He described the Coordination Center and other top-level domain registries’ principles of collaborating with vendors, software developers, major email services and social networks. He also drew attention to the importance of the IDN petition urging internet services to work on adapting IDN domains for the addressing and authenticating of users as soon as possible. The IDN petition was signed by more than 20 registries of the CIS, Eastern Europe and Central Asia during TLDCON 2016 in Georgia.
On September 21, the Coordination Center experts continued to share their experience in registrar organization and current work with registrants and information security with their colleagues from the Asia-Pacific Region. Head of special projects at the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Eugene Pankov spoke at the session. The participants discussed how to stimulate the work of registrars on the market, to create a competitive field and thereby to increase the domain zone’s growth rates. Eugene Pankov explained what the Coordination Center is doing in this area and shared some of his work tips.
Mikhail Anisimov gave a report at the information security session. He talked about the current trends in dealing with malicious resources using the DNS system. He spoke in detail about how this process is currently organized in the Russian national .RU and .РФ domains, how competent agencies and the Coordination Center’s Netoscope project work, and how such initiatives are developing all over the world. “Our main goal now is not to fight existing malware resources, but to create reliable analytical tools that would help predict the use of domain names for illegal purposes at an early stage and thus significantly reduce the damage caused to users as a result of phishing, the spread of malware and botnets,” he said.
