RIGF 2025 hosted the Virtuti Interneti award ceremony (For Internet Merit) established by the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ in 2010. This year, it was won by Pavel Khramtsov, one of the oldest figures in the Runet, who stood at the origins of the internet in Russia, and later trained several generations of IT specialists working today in the largest domestic companies.
Pavel Khramtsov graduated from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute and began his career at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. Among his first tasks was relieving the outcome of the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant: information systems he designed were used to track radiation levels within the 30- and 60-kilometer zones surrounding the plant, as well as to model the release of radioactivity from the fourth damaged unit of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. After that, as an expert he took part in the JSP1 and JSP2 international projects held as part of the Commission of the European Communities’ program for the development of information systems helping relieve the consequences of nuclear accidents.
In 1996, Pavel Khramtsov’s bestseller The Internet Labyrinth: A Practical Guide was published, which gave one of the first descriptions of the application layer technologies of the TCP/IP stack in Russian.
Pavel Khramtsov is a university professor at RSUH and MEPhI, and a creator of several lecture courses: World Information Resources, Open Systems, Computing Systems and Networks, and Fundamentals of Web Technologies (2003, 2007) among others.
He systematically collects statistical and information-analytical materials on the development of the domain name market and IP address space and is the main ideologist and developer of the Coordination Center’s Netoscope project.
Today, Pavel Khramtsov works as head of DNS projects at MSK-IX and as scientific director for educational projects at the Indata Network Technology Development Fund.
In his remarks, winner of Virtuti Interneti Pavel Khramtsov spoke about how the internet advanced from being a communication environment for professionals to a commercial environment.
“In the late 1980s and the early 1990s the internet did not have a cult of privacy and widespread encryption. It was a communication environment for professionals and information systems, where, for example, information on how to relieve the consequences of the Chernobyl accident circulated freely and openly in the early 1990s, and the Morris worm was possible. Everything changed when the web began to be used for commercial purposes and the advertising appeared in online publications and search engines,” Pavel Khramtsov said.
The speaker stressed that e-commerce and digital financing had given rise to phishing and botnets, and the material damage from remote thefts amounted to more than 168 billion rubles in just 11 months of 2024.
“The atmosphere of unity has been replaced by an atmosphere of suspicion. It is time we all got out of this red ocean and started looking for a new blue ocean,” Pavel Khramtsov said.
Virtuti Interneti is awarded to representatives of the internet community, businesspeople, scientists and officials who have made a significant contribution to the development of the Runet and the global internet. In previous years, it went to Steve Crocker, inventor of the RFC Internet policy format, a founder of the technical community of global internet builders; Wolfgang Kleinwachter, honorary professor of internet policy and regulation at the Department of Media and Information Studies at Aarhus University; Jovan Kurbalija, author of the Internet Governance book; Alexei Platonov, one of the founders of Runet, former director of RosNIIROS and director of MSK-IX; Sergei Plugotarenko, director of the Digital Economy autonomous non-profit organization; and Elena Voronina, director of the Indata Network Technology Development Fund, among many others.
