On October 27, experts from the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ took part in three sections of APTLD 82.
Leonid Todorov, General Manager of APTLD, moderated the technical session on the problems of sanctioned registries. Irina Danelia, Deputy Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU, also took part in the discussion. She spoke about the difficulties the Coordination Center faced due to the imposed sanctions and how it builds its work under the sanctions pressure.
“Formally, there are no sanctions imposed on the Coordination Center as a ccTLD registry. The only thing that could be considered as a kind of sanctions against the Center as a registry is the decision of CENTR to suspend our membership in it,” Irina Danelia noted.
However, she also noted that there are a number of sanctions against Russia that directly affect the activities of the Coordination Center as a registry: for example, there were certain difficulties with transactions and payments. Moreover, the established supply chains have been disrupted - many companies have decided to stop providing services within Russia. These companies also include those who sell hardware and software: Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Cisco, and many others.
“You can do without Starbucks or Zara, but it’s quite difficult to quickly replace software and hardware suppliers,” Irina added.
Evgeny Kuskevich, a representative of the .SU domain registry, took part in the session. He spoke about the activities of RIPN as a registry for the .SU domain and shared how the organization has to organize its activities in the current conditions.
The session was also attended by a representative of ICANN, who noted that since the beginning of the spring of this year, the corporation has received requests in which its management was asked to take a number of public actions in relation to the Russian Federation. He noted that ICANN's answer was no - the corporation's mission is to ensure the security, stability and resiliency of the DNS, and they do not plan to deviate from it. Olga Baskakova, project manager of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU, shared experience of the Coordination Center with the stop list during the session devoted to policy issues in the field of "black lists" of domain names. She talked about the reasons why a domain name can be put on the stop list, about the policy of reserving domain names in the .РФ for government needs and to ensure the interests of trademark and trademark owners, as well as about ways to resolve potential conflicts of interest in this areas.
The next technical session was about internationalized email addresses (EAI). During this session, the Chief Analyst of the Coordination Center and the Chair of the Russian Working Group on Universal Acceptance, Maria Kolesnikova, shared the experience of the national registry in the implementation of support for internationalized email addresses.
“EAI standards were developed in 2012, but users continue to face various issues when using internationalized email addresses on websites, online services and applications. When we took up this issue, first of all, we started with ourselves and today we have already provided EAI support on our corporate website, project sites, in the mail and ticket systems,” Maria said.
She also spoke about the project of the Coordination Center for the development of infrastructure for supporting Cyrillic domains and email addresses “Поддерживаю.РФ”, the website of which contains practical and educational information on the implementation of support and correct work with EAI. The project provides Cyrillic emails for software testing, and its team regularly conducts trainings and webinars for technical specialists and ordinary users.
“We communicate not only with developers, system administrators and mail service providers, but also with end users. In our opinion, it is necessary to communicate with both parties - generating demand and providing supply - this is necessary for further adaptation of the EAI standard in software and expanding the possibilities for users to use internationalized e-mail addresses,” Maria Kolesnikova added.
The APTLD82 turned out to be eventful - both days were filled with lively discussions and discussions. Recall that the Asia-Pacific Association of Top-Level Domains (APTLD) unites more than 50 national registries of the region, including the registries of the largest national top-level domains: Russia, China, India and other countries. APTLD was established in 1998 and is one of four regional ccTLD registry organizations.
