The final section of the first day of TLDCON 2023 was devoted to development trends and new marketing methods in national domains. The moderator of the section, Deputy Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Irina Danelia, noted that the growth rate of ccTLDs around the world is declining, and they are losing their market share to generic domains. According to ZOOKNIC, the share of country-specific domains decreased from 43 % to 39% from 2017 to 2023. Irina invited the section participants to share the experience of their countries and discuss possible ways to solve this problem.
RAEC Director Sergey Grebennikov spoke about the development trends of the Runet in 2022 and their impact on the development of the domain market. He noted that the main driver of the growth of ccTLDs is small and medium-sized businesses. RAEC predicts that in 2023 the Runet economy will grow by 29%, reaching 15.8 trillion rubles. However, such growth will be possible only with the successful completion of the import substitution program and with active support for small and medium-sized businesses.
Sergey emphasized that today small and medium-sized businesses in most cases use .RU and .РФ for their websites. “ccTLDs are our everything,” the speaker noted. He also announced the All-Russian event “Digital Dictation”, which will take place from September 29 to October 15 and will become the largest digital literacy test in Russia.
APTLD General Manager Leonid Todorov shared the features and trends of the domain industry in the Asia-Pacific region. He noted that the growth of Asian zones during the COVID-19 pandemic was followed by a sharp decline, and emphasized that national zones were never able to recover from the launch of new domains and compete with “old” domains such as .COM. Leonid Todorov cited the dominance of social networks as another feature of the region that also influences the weak development of national domains.
Then, representatives of national registries spoke about their findings in the field of marketing. Yudho Giri Sucahyo (.ID, PANDI) spoke about Indonesia's experience in promoting a national domain. “We are very lucky with the domain name; our national domain is very popular not only within the country,” said the speaker. Today, the .ID domain has nearly 785,000 domain names and is the largest country code domain in Southeast Asia.
Anna Karakhanyan (.AM and .հայ, ISOC AM) shared the difficulties of developing the IDN domain in Armenia. Anna strongly supports the idea of further development and popularization of IDNs. “The Armenian language has more than 350,000 words, and the Armenian alphabet is one of the most ancient in the world, it is more than 16 centuries old, and it needs to be represented on the Internet,” emphasized Anna Karakhanyan.
Vadim Krasnovsky (.BY and .BEL, hoster.by) showed new methods and marketing tools using the example of the Belarusian domain zones .BY and .BEL. The section was completed by Alexey Goncharov (Serpantin advertising agency), who emphasized the importance of personalized gifts and souvenirs in strengthening the emotional connection with clients.
The second day of TLDCON 2023 opened with the “Network Measurements and Analysis” section, moderated by Elena Voronina, Development Director of the Indata Foundation for the Development of Network Technologies. Analysts and technicians exchanged ideas on useful network measuring techniques and research findings.
Representatives of the RIPE NCC, Bastian Goslings and Johan ter Beest, took part in the section. Bastian Goslings spoke about the vulnerabilities of the BGP protocol and how RPKI policy can be used to improve the security of routes, and Johan ter Beest spoke about the opportunities and development directions of the RIPE Atlas project.
Dmitry Kovalenko (MSK-IX) demonstrated how registries can use MoSAPI measurement results to monitor and diagnose service quality.
Olga Baskakova, Project Manager of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, spoke in detail about the new analytical project that the Center is currently engaged in. “The well-known “Russian Domains” project, supported by the Technical Center of Internet, contains a huge array of interesting and useful information, but in recent years we have begun to realize that we need to move further and analyze additional aspects of the data,” noted Olga. She presented a prototype of the new system statistics, which will complement and expand the data provided today on the “Russian Domains” portal (statdom.ru). New analytical tools - which experts and analysts of the Coordination Center are currently working on - will be used to analyze data, determine trends and formulate forecasts for the development of Russian domain zones. Olga also demonstrated what the statistical and analytical reports of the new project could look like. The launch of the project is scheduled for 2024.
In conclusion, Pavel Khramtsov (Indata) shared methods for analyzing APNIC data to identify public resolvers used by end users.
The TLDCON concluded with the section “Time is money: The Market Under the Gun.” The moderator of the section was the Head of the Department for Interaction with Registrars and Users of the Coordination Center, Georgy Georgievsky. He invited experts from registrars and competent organizations to discuss phishing trends: attacker tactics, risks to users and platforms, and effective methods to counter them.
Project Manager of the Center Evgeniy Pankov spoke in detail about the activities of the “Domain Patrol” project. He shared the results of his work in 2022 and 2023, highlighted the most common phishing methods and pointed out brands that are especially attractive to scammers. Thus, in 2023, the number of requests from competent organizations to registrars more than doubled and the bulk of attacks were aimed at 10 brands: Avito, Youla, Ozon, Sberbank, Alfa Bank, Telegram, Yandex, VK, Booking and Nalozhka.
Kirill Myakishev (OZON) shared the company’s experience in the fight against phishing websites. He noted that since the beginning of 2023, OZON has blocked 11,493 phishing resources that imitated the marketplace, and this is 100 times more than during the same period in 2022. At the same time, according to the company, every second Russian fell for fraud during online purchases, and a third of them lost more than 5,000 rubles.
Stanislav Goncharov (F.A.C.C.T.) presented current data and phishing trends in the .RU and .РФ zones: since the beginning of 2023, the company has blocked more than 10,000 phishing domains, of which 35% were from online services, 28% from financial institutions and 21% - for delivery services. At the same time, he noted that the share of phishing in the .RU zone is small and amounts to only 5% of the total number of detected phishing pages, and in the .РФ zone - less than 1%.
Dmitry Kiryushkin (BI.ZONE) spoke about the growing scheme of domain name hijacking: since the beginning of 2023, more than 600 domains have been stolen from administrators, on which criminals posted phishing content using incorrect configuration of NS records. He noted that the costs of fraudsters for creating, maintaining and advertising one phishing website amount to 5,000 - 7,000 rubles, and for them to pay off, the income from it must be higher. According to BI.ZONE estimates, fraudsters’ income from phishing can amount to up to 1 billion rubles per year.
Marina Brik (RU-CENTER/REG.RU) spoke about how the company works with requests from competent organizations, government bodies and users about the misuse of domain names.
Summing up the results of the Conference, Andrey Vorobyev, Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, noted the active work of the Program Committee. He proposed to include in its composition representatives of organizations authorized to determine violations on the Internet.
“A special feature of this Conference was the holding of an educational track, as well as the successful launch of the School of Mentors of the “Study the Internet & Govern It!”. The first 50 teachers will begin training in October this year. Another result of the Conference was the signing of an agreement with Petrozavodsk State University to conduct a series of lectures from experts of the Coordination Center and to engage university students in the work of the ‘Поддерживаю.РФ’ project.
Also, the Conference and its educational track were highly appreciated by Leonid Liminchuk, Member of Legislative Assembly, Chairman of the Committee on Economic and Industrial Policy, Energy and Housing and Communal Services of Karelia, and we have planned to hold a number of joint events in the future,” he said.
At this point the Conference concluded. We thank all partners and participants, and we look forward to meeting you at TLDCON 2024!
