On December 6, Russian Internet Week (RIW 20/21) kicked off in the Smart City pavilion at VDNKh in Moscow. The events are held in a hybrid format, with some participants present on site and others following the RIW 20/21 events online.
Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin greeted the RIW 20/21 participants, noting the importance of building up the country’s own digital competencies, increasing the level of digital literacy, creating high-quality digital services and products, and popularizing technology-based approaches. “The pandemic has given a new impetus to the digital transformation. During lockdown, digitalization enabled teleworking, online education, online shopping, and telemedicine. Each of us had a chance to feel the importance of internet technologies and online services. I would especially like to note how quickly and efficiently the largest tech companies acted amid the spread of the coronavirus infection, which showed their social responsibility. They quickly enhanced capacity, providing people with free access to services, and helped doctors a lot. That was a vivid example of a truly effective digital circuit in place in Russia, a unique ecosystem of companies and online services,” Mikhail Mishustin said.
Alexander Khinshtein, Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, IT and Communications, noted the importance of supporting IT entrepreneurs, stressing that they are the creators of national leaders in almost all areas. The speaker reminded his audience that even today, the Russian IT industry needs 500,000 – 1 million more people, and six years from now, the demand will grow to 2 million. In this regard, Alexander Khinshtein suggested making a bigger effort to popularize IT professions, and spoke about the current state policies to support the IT industry. “Russia is demonstrating remarkable approaches in terms of state support for the IT industry,” Alexander Khinshtein stressed.
Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrey Vorobyev noted that domain industry trends can confirm (or, sometimes, refute) the numerous reports and studies of the Runet. “By the end of 2021, the national domain .RU is expected to grow by 1.5 percent. Small and medium-sized businesses have been the main growth factor during the pandemic in 2020-2021 because they have expanded into the internet landscape to communicate with their consumers. As a token of gratitude to small and medium-sized businesses, we have established a special Runet Prize category for SME development on the Runet,” Andrey Vorobyev added.
One of the main reasons why .РФ is still lagging behind is that not all .РФ email and other services accept Cyrillic domain names and email addresses. This will be discussed at the next session today, “The History of Internet Internationalization, or when Russian users will be able to use the Internet entirely in Russian,” organized by the Coordination Center as part of the Domain Marathon. “A definite breakthrough happened this summer: Bitrix now fully accepts Cyrillic-script domains. We are waiting for Yandex and Mail.ru to join the club,” Andrey Vorobyev said. He also noted the importance of domain name registrars cooperating with ESIA, the Russian e-government system of trusted identities. This should simplify their communication with users and increase the reliability of information about domain name administrators on Whois.
Sergey Plugotarenko (RAEC), Sergey Grebennikov (RAEC), and Marina Amelina (Baring Vostok) also delivered remarks at the opening session.
Andrey Vorobyev spoke at the Internet Today session that followed the opening of RIW 20/21. He reviewed the development of the internet in 2020-2021 and presented the findings of an analytical report, Internet Trends: From Digital Opportunities to Digital Reality, prepared by the Higher School of Economics National Research University and commissioned by the Coordination Center. He noted that the Coordination Center turned 20 this year. For the past two decades, the Coordination Center has facilitated the development of the digital economy in Russia, coordinating domain name registrations for government agencies, commercial companies, non-profit organizations, and individual projects.
According to Andrey Vorobyev, .RU is one of the top 10 ccTLDs globally and has been ranked eighth for the third year in a row. .РФ is one of the largest IDNs in the world and the largest Cyrillic domain. At the same time, there is a steady demand for country-code top-level domains on the Russian domain market, with small and medium-sized businesses being the growth driver, as has been already mentioned. The main challenge internet users continue to struggle with is cyber threats; this topic will be discussed at length during the Countering Threats on the Web 2021: Meeting with Competent Organizations session tomorrow.
Today, RIW will feature a session on “The History of Internet Internationalization, or when Russian users will be able to use the Internet entirely in Russian,” and the DOT Journalism 2021 awards ceremony. Join the online stream at https://runet-id.com/event/riw2021/ and follow our updates.
