On May 27, the 28th Russian Internet Forum (RIF 2024) opened in Moscow. RIF in the City 2024 is dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Runet and being held in the format of a city Internet festival: May 27-28 in the Ostankino.Fest park and May 29 at the iConText Group site, where the topic of online information security will be discussed. The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ again became a key partner of the Forum.
The Forum opened with the analytical panel “Runet 30. What’s next?”. RAEC Director Sergei Grebennikov welcomed participants and announced the main figures of the “Runet Economy”: Runet grew in 2023 by 40% compared to 2022. The contribution of the Internet economy to the Russian economy in 2023 amounted to ₽17.1 trillion. According to RAEC, 84% of the country’s population uses the Internet today. “We were looking forward to the 30th anniversary of .RU and Runet. And we are proud of our Runet!” – the speaker said.
IRI General Director Alexey Goreslavsky noted the importance of import substitution for the growth of domestic digital content. He reminded that if in 2022 the Internet entertainment industry found itself in a very difficult situation, then in 2023 there was a sharp increase in the share of Russian media content, primarily due to the emergence of new domestic products.
Import substitution also had a positive impact on the Russian blast furnace industry. Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrey Vorobyev spoke about how Russian national domain zones grew in 2023 and early 2024. .RU grew by 10.3% in 2023 and added more than half a million new domain names over the year, while .РФ increased by 13.7%. The growth rate remains high in 2024: in the first four months of 2024, .RU grew by almost 200,000 domain names. Andrey Vorobyev named the main drivers of growth as the transfer of websites to Russian jurisdiction and the entry to the market of a large number of new projects aimed at the Russian audience.
“2023 was a unique year in terms of the growth rate of Russian domains. Interestingly, this growth was spurred, among other things, by the policies of some domain zone registries - for example, .AERO, which began to refuse registration and renewal of domain names for Russian companies. The development and growth of .РФ was largely influenced by the great work of the Coordination Center in the field of introducing Universal Acceptance, in particular, in promoting email in non-Latin alphabets,” Director of the Center said.
He also noted the great work that accredited registrars made in 2023, carrying out many marketing campaigns.
Another topic of the analytical panel was cybersecurity. Andrey Vorobyev spoke about the importance of industry self-regulation in an environment where the growth of phishing in 2023 was +210%. In the .RU zone alone, 48,529 phishing domains were identified in 2023, and the share of phishing resources hosted by Russian hosting providers increased from 12.9% to 46.5%. He named the introduction of domain name registration through Gosuslugi as one of the important factors for reducing the number of phishing resources.
“It is obvious that self-regulation can no longer cope with the growth of phishing, and legislative regulation is necessary to improve the security of the Russian domain space. Tomorrow, at the site of the Presidential Administration, there will be a working meeting held to introduce a bill regulating, in particular, the registration of domains through the USIA (Unified System Of Identification And Authentication). And if such a bill is promptly introduced and adopted, we assume that 2025 will become a transitional year. We expect that this will significantly reduce the number of registered phishing domains,” Andrey Vorobyev said.
RU-CENTER General Director Andrey Kuzmichev spoke about the importance of registering domain names through Gosuslugi. “In mid-May, RU-CENTER was the first and only to launch identification of hosting owners through Gosuslugi. Today, already 30% of all new contracts are concluded through Gosuslugi - this both fulfills the regulator’s requirements regarding the identification of owners of Internet resources, and at the same time improves the user experience, since there is no need to manually fill out many fields. I evaluate even this intermediate result very well and urge it to be scaled to the entire domain hosting industry,” the speaker said.
The analytical panel was completed by the Director of the Digital Economy ANO Sergey Plugotarenko, who spoke about the situation with personnel in the IT industry.
Then, a fruitful program awaits the forum participants: thus, at 14:00 on the RIF in the City stage, the Ministry for Digital Development of the Russian Federation will present awards to honored workers of the IT industry for their services in the formation and development of the Russian segment of the Internet and many years of fruitful work and on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the .RU domain and the Runet itself.
“DOT-Journalism 2024”, in which hundreds of journalists from all over the country take part every year, will start at 16:00. This year, one of the topics of the competition will be the history of the Runet, and both professional journalists and teenagers and young people under the age of 18 will be able to take part in the competition.
At 18:30, the traditional domain section will be held in the tent of the Coordination Center: “Domain .RU is 30, .РФ is 14, .ДЕТИ is 10 years old. But We are still Discussing: Do Businesses Need Domains?”, which will bring together domain industry professionals.
Also on May 27-28, in the tent of the Coordination Center, participants will enjoy competitions and quizzes for the 30th anniversary of .RU and Runet, where they can win prizes and gifts from the Center and registrars.
The Russian Internet Forum continues! Follow our publications!
