The 6th World Internet Conference held in China’s town of Wuzhen brought together more than 1,500 participants from all around the world. The event was timed to coincide with several important occasions – the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, the 50th anniversary of the global internet and the 25th anniversary of the Chinese internet. With the theme of Intelligent Interconnection for Openness and Cooperation, the three-day long conference focused on discussing the latest trends in internet governance, and new technologies and international cooperation in the development of the internet.
Head of Russia’s Roskomnadzor watchdog Alexander Zharov who spoke at the opening session said that at the moment, the most important goal is to find a balance between the opportunities that the internet provides and network security. According to him, the new network drivers, such as big data, artificial intelligence and the internet of things, will soon make everyone think about reviewing the procedures for drafting internet governance policies: “The internet is a product of globalization, but we are also witnessing a number of other processes, too. An increasingly important role in internet governance is played by international corporations. The international community needs to develop a set of rules that will be binding for all interested parties. We need to move away from the policy of confrontation to cooperation in such fields as the introduction of new technologies, protection against cyber threats and ensuring the transparency of markets.”
On the second day of the conference, a closed-door meeting was held devoted to the development and implementation of new protocols such as IPv6, IDN and EAI. Mikhail Anisimov, head of the TLD .RU/.РФ Coordination Center's information department, attended the event.
Much attention was paid to the development and implementation of domains and email in non-Latin languages. The initiator of the meeting, director of the .ASIA gTLD registry Edmund Chang, invited the participants to think together about what can be done to accelerate the implementation of new protocols.
John Klensin, one of the authors and ideologists of the IDN concept, commented on the progress of the IDN implementation. Admitting that there are unresolved technical problems, the most important being email support in national alphabets and the IDN Variants problem (similarity of individual characters from different alphabets, which can lead to errors in the interpretation of domain names), he said the current technical level could allow for the trouble-free use of non-Latin domain names and emails within a community using the same alphabet. Problems begin when you want to send a letter from a Cyrillic address to a Chinese or Arabic one. Solving this problem would require close cooperation between the specialists working on the implementation of different scripts in email, but, unfortunately, we are observing the opposite trend so far, he added.
Mikhail Anisimov noted: “Today we can see examples of new protocols being introduced, driven by businesses, not governments. For example, after several operators (including Google and CloudFlare) introduced public DNS servers using DoH, a significant part of the global DNS traffic became encrypted. Many remember the DNS Flag Day in early 2019 – that was an example of an initiative that forced a huge number of DNS providers and operators to change the settings of their equipment and software in a very short period of time. Of course, this is not always possible, but the Paretto rule tells us that introducing EAI support by just a few of the largest email providers will solve this problem for the vast majority of users.”
Along with the conference, Wuzhen is also hosting a high-tech expo, which featured an award ceremony for best technological innovations organized by the Cyberspace Administration of China together with several Chinese universities. The main highlights of the exhibition are artificial intelligence and smart city, cybersecurity, autonomous systems, 5G and the internet of things.
