The 24th Russian Internet Forum (RIF+CIB 2020) has got underway online for the first time. Speakers are taking part in sessions from home, while the audience are asking questions via the RIF.Online website and in the chat on the forum’s YouTube channel.
Coordination Center Director Andrey Vorobyev spoke at the opening of RIF.Online. He paid special attention to the 26th anniversary of the .RU domain and to the 10th anniversary of .РФ, and also spoke about the center’s projects to mark these special dates.
“It was only a week ago that we were celebrating the key event for the Russian segment of the net: the 26th anniversary of the national domain .RU. Thus, we have begun a new stage in the life of Runet and at the same time summarized the results of 2019 which was devoted to the .RU anniversary. In a month from now, we will mark another important event, the 10th anniversary of .РФ, one of the world’s first top-level IDN domains. We have launched the 10.кц.рф website and the Поддерживаю.рф project, a unique and one of the first local projects on the universal acceptance of IDN domains with a focus on the support of Cyrillic domain names and email addresses, first of all in .РФ. I also want to use this opportunity to mention that tomorrow, April 16, the 8th DOT Journalism annual competition for professional and amateur online journalists will start, and on April 21, the second stage of the Family IT Marathon that will allow family teams to check their cyber literacy and creative skills,” Andrey Vorobyev said.
Questions related to the .РФ domain were also included in the Digital Dictation 2020, but unfortunately most of the participants were not able to answer them. Therefore, the Coordination Center director promised to improve the center’s website and increase awareness of the domain industry.
The website 10.кц.рф will facilitate the promotion of the Russian domain .РФ among users. They will find the news about the world’s largest Cyrillic domain .РФ and congratulations by its friends, colleagues and partners, and also many interesting facts about the domain, its history and the schedule of the anniversary events. In the Archive section, one will be able to indulge in nostalgia and recall how it all began 10 years ago.
The website also has another interesting section, They Chose .РФ (Они выбрали .РФ), a list of some domain names that were registered in .РФ on the first day of the open registration and that have operating websites. In all, 207,648 domain names were registered on the first day of the registration, and 49,149 are still operating.
The Поддерживаю.рф project is devoted to the universal acceptance and support of Cyrillic email addresses and domain names in software and is designed, first of all, for technical experts. The issue of acceptance of domains and email addresses written in national alphabets is 10 years old. The Russian project is one of the first local projects aimed at solving this problem and has already received support of the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) under ICANN.
Andrey Vorobyev also summarized the results of the first year of the Regional Group of Universal Acceptance in the CIS and Eastern Europe.
RIF.Online will last until September and will become one of the longest internet forums: over a period of five months, over 100 online sections with 300 speakers will be held. The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ is the forum’s co-organizer and plans to hold a series of sections and meetings. Stay tuned!
