The XI Youth Forum "Ethical, Cultural And Civilizational Aspects Of Working On The Internet", organized by the Russian Association for Networks and Services (RANS), the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ and Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics (MTUCI), was held in the Congress Center of MTUCI on May 17.
Chairman of the RANS Executive Committee Alexander Ivanyuk, Rector of MTUCI Sergey Erokhin, Director of the Cybersecurity Department of the Ministry of Digital Development of Russia Vladimir Bengin, Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrey Vorobyev and Vice President of GardaTechnologies Group of Companies Boris Miroshnikov spoke at the opening of the forum.
“The 11th Youth Forum is already begun today on International Telecommunication and Information Society Day, organised by RANS in partnership with the Coordination Center and MTUCI. It's nice to see interested students in this hall - future young professionals developing the Internet industry. To immerse yourself in the context of Internet Governance, we invite students to study at the Internet Governance Summer School, which will begin accepting applications in early July. The Center conducts the School together with St. Petersburg State University, education is completely free. The Youth Council also operates under the Center, which has brought together enterprising young industry professionals who take part in various projects both at the Russian, regional and international levels,” Director of the Coordination Center Andrey Vorobyev addressed the forum participants.
The forum participants discussed the development of production and distribution of domestic audiovisual content on the Internet, issues of technological independence of the infrastructure of the Russian segment of the Internet, as well as tasks in the field of training cadre capable of representing the interests of the country within the global Internet Governance ecosystem.
Maria Kolesnikova, Chief Analyst of the Coordination Center, spoke about the socio-cultural and technical aspects of the development of the Russian language on the Internet. Russian is one of the six working languages of many international organizations, including the UN, UNESCO and ITU. It is also the main language of international communication (the so-called "lingua franca") in the CIS region, in whose countries 2023 is declared the year of the Russian language.
Even if the number of Russian speakers is only tenth in the world, the language is ranked fifth in the Global Competitiveness Index, and when it comes to the number of websites, Russian is second among all languages on the Internet. Maria also noted that the Russian .РФ domain is the largest among all Cyrillic IDN domains, and spoke about the development of domains and e-mail addresses using symbols of national alphabets.
Maria shared the experience of the Coordination Center on ensuring the Universal Acceptance of Cyrillic IDN domains and EAI email addresses. She drew the participants' attention to the fact that the Center, as the registry of the Cyrillic ccTLD, has already made its systems - corporate website, mail server, ticket system - ready to work with Universal Acceptance. “Today, practically everyone has the chance to connect their own systems with the Universal Acceptance principles. Standards and software have been created, and there are developers on the market who are prepared to put all of this into practice. Therefore, it is now important for us that the idea of a multilingual Internet and the need to implement Universal Acceptance be actively supported by users. Feel free to declare your desire to use Russian-language domains and email addresses and demand their support from the manufacturers of the software you use,” Maria Kolesnikova said.
