The 14th Russian Internet Week (RIW 2022) has started in Moscow at the MIA Rossiya Segodnya site. The conference, which covers strategic sections and block sessions on important digital economy topics, takes place from December 12 to 13.
The RIW 2022 work program was opened by the analytical panel “RuNet Today. Figures and Trends”, which presented the main trends in the sectors of the digital economy, announced the results of 2022 and forecasts for the next year.
During the panel, the results and forecasts were presented by Sergey Plugotarenko (ANO Tsifrovaya ekonomika), Sergey Grebennikov (RAEK), Andrey Vorobyev (Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ), Andrey Tsepelev (ANO Dialog Regions), Dmitry Rusakov (Yandex), Vasily Cherny (Brand Analytics), Konstantin Romanov (Beeline), Maria Georgievskaya (AdIndex), Svetlana Beregulina (inSales) and other experts.
Andrey Vorobyev, Director of the Coordination Center, in his report described how the events of 2022 affected the development and growth of the domestic Internet infrastructure and domain space. He noted that the sanctions did not have a significant impact on the number of certificates issued by global to Russian domains - the main foreign supplier of certificates, as before the sanctions, remains the American company Let's Encrypt, which sees its mission as a free issuance of certificates for everyone in the name of the public good. “A number of major certification centers announced the revocation of SSL and TLS certificates, and the question of import substitution arose in March. The Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation worked very quickly - they created a domestic certification center, and we were able to quickly rectify the situation on the market,” Andrey Vorobyev said.
As for the data center market, according to Andrey Vorobyev, in 2022 the rate of commissioning of new rack spaces by the largest data center operators remains at the level of 4-5 thousand per year, which is below the plan. Many projects are being postponed, and problems with the supply of equipment due to sanctions lead to the risk of further lengthening the implementation of planned projects. But even with a negative scenario, the current growth rate of 10-15% per year will remain in the commercial data center market. In addition, Russian data center providers promise to launch up to 20,000 rack spaces by the end of 2023.
As for the level of domestic localization of services, today it is very high: more than 70% of Russian domains are located at domestic hosts. At the same time, until 2022, the majority of Russian websites (70%) were hosted entirely on Russian websites and delegated the name service completely to domestic DNS servers.
The beginning of the special military operation and the subsequent sanctions of the West, of course, had an impact on the development of Russian domains. In .RU, starting from March 2022, the number of domain names has been decreasing, and as a result, since December 2021, the number of domain names in RU has decreased by 70.5 thousand in 12 months. The main reason for this is the refusal of foreign administrators from .RU domain names due to the inability to pay for the renewal. At the same time, in the Russian Federation, growth was observed, and over the same period, the Russian Federation grew by almost 6 thousand domain names. “We expected a dramatic drop in the number of domain names in national domain zones, but by the end of the year it became clear that this did not happen - the dynamics of the number of Russian domain registrations remained fairly even and stable,” Andrey Vorobyev said.
An expanded meeting of the committees of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ will be held today at RIW 2022, where participants will discuss the need to collect personal data when providing Internet services, the state and prospects for the preparation of the Global Digital Compact, the impact of external factors on the development of the domain space and other relevant questions.
