The Russian Internet Governance Forum held its now traditional education days. On April 8 and 9, RIGF 2025 speakers and experts met with students enrolled in Moscow and St. Petersburg universities.
Maria Kolesnikova, Senior Analyst at the Coordination center for TLD .RU/.РФ, and Coordination Center Director, Andrey Vorobyev, delivered a lecture at the Russian People’s Friendship University. They talked about creating a multilingual environment online and the role language diversity can play in the digital realm. They titled their lecture “Preserving multilingualism online,” and focused on the role the Russian language has been playing online compared to other languages, as well as its importance for online users.
“There are 7,164 languages around the world, and English has always dominated the online world. However, the next cohort of about a billion new online users will come from regions where English is not a mother tongue. The problem is that websites, software internalization and localization, machine translation, language models have been developed for the most commonly spoken language around the world, so a rare language or a language that faces extinction may not have any online presence,” Maria Kolesnikova said.
Today, the Russian language ranks fifth in the world in terms of the number of websites with a 4.3 percent share, and it ranks ninth by the number of users who are native Russian speakers. Together with specialists from other countries, Coordination center for TLD .RU/.РФ experts have gone to great lengths to preserve multilingualism online, including by empowering users speaking various languages to use connected devices and browse the web, while also providing language options in applications and online services, offering more online content in local languages, and promoting internationalized domain names and email addresses. In this regard, the Coordination Center views efforts to promote the Cyrillic alphabet online, as well as promoting the .РФ country-code domain as its core mission.
At the Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy, Vice Rector for Development, Innovation and Digital Transformation Alexander Ulanov delivered a talk on data management in state institutions. In his lecture, he offered a definition of data and their types, and went on to cover the topic of big data, data life cycles and the key data-related processes. Mr. Udalov paid special attention to data management systems and what makes data management special for state institutions, including security and compliance matters. The speaker also told students that the Diplomatic Academy was about to set up an AI laboratory to help its faculty, researchers and students master AI skills such as prompt engineering.
Students at the Diplomatic Academy also benefited from a lecture on the international ICT agenda by Arevik Martirosyan, who is a research fellow at the Diplomatic Academy’s Institute of International Studies and heads the International Information Security School within this institution. His lecture focused on global ICT governance and cooperation, with a special emphasis on the relevant institutions, including the UN Open-Ended Working Group on security of and in the use of ICTs.
At Bonch-Bruevich Saint Petersburg State University of Telecommunications, Anastasia Savelyeva, Senior Faculty Member at the Information and Communications Systems Department and curator of the RIGF 2025 course and the summer internet governance school, delivered a lecture on the latest developments in information and communications sectors. She focused on the notion of internet governance by describing it in various aspects, including technical, legal and social matters. The lecture also covered the theory and practice of internet governance with a focus on digital, informational and technological sovereignty, as well as the way major tech companies use their digital platforms for shaping the way information can be accessed online.
