On October 8 and 9, Moscow is hosting the 25th Annual Conference ICT Infrastructure State and Development Prospects. Held by the Association of Documentary Telecommunication (ADT), it serves as a platform for its participants to meet industry leaders, as well as heads and experts representing entities involved in developing Russia’s ICT infrastructure, and also promoting confidence building and security when using it.
Deputy Minister of Digital Development, Alexander Shoitov, took the floor during the opening session to say that technological independence, trust and information security were the key elements of the digital transition. He went on to emphasize that the Russian software inventory must include a Trusted Software section, and by 2030 Russia is expected to fully transition to trusted technological solutions and hardware.
The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ took part in this anniversary conference as a general partner and held a roundtable discussion titled Developing the Russian Internet Segment. Experts discussed efforts to make the Russian internet even more accessible, while also boosting its performance, improving quality and safety, including by promoting online the Russian language and other state languages used by various ethnic groups across the country. Vladimir Gorzhaltsan, who is an Advisor to the Coordination Center’s Director, moderated the session, and the panel included Maria Kolesnikova from the Coordination Center, Runity Group’s Andrey Kuzmichev, Yevgeny Morozov of MSK-IX, Alexey Rogdev of the Technical Center of Internet, and Igor Sviridov of the Integral Research Institute.
The Coordination Center’s Chief Analyst, Maria Kolesnikova, offered a preliminary performance report regarding the Coordination Center’s efforts to make more Cyrillic characters available when registering domain names in the .РФ zone. Users can currently register their domains in 17 official languages spoken by the people of Russia in the .РФ zone, with support for the Ossetian language to be added by the end of the year. She also said that supporting Russia’s minority languages online, including within the country-code domain space, reinforces digital sovereignty and helps Russia preserve its cultural and linguistic diversity.
“The Principles of State Language Policy of the Russian Federation stipulate that all languages used by the people of Russia must benefit from state support, including online. This is something to be taken into account when developing the ICT sector and creating software domestically, including by ensuring that all the possible Cyrillic domain names and email addresses are compatible with all the software, services and websites,” Maria Kolesnikova pointed out.
Today, only 13 percent of the 167 most popular online resources among Russian users can handle Cyrillic email addresses, i.e., consisting of characters pertaining to languages spoken in Russia both before and after the @ sign, while all the other websites show a Wrong Email Address message.
Maria Kolesnikova also said that there are 5.6 billion internet users among 8.2 billion people around the world, which amounts to two thirds of the global population. At the same time, only 1.5 billion people speak English, which means that the internet is no longer limited to the English language and has expanded to include other languages. This is a reality that affects the way the digital environment has been evolving.
Sergey Bobryshev, who heads Business Development at ParaType, devoted his presentation to promoting the Russian language and Russia’s minority languages online.
“ParaType has a 30-year track record in developing multilingual fonts, and many of them already include characters from Russia’s minority languages, even if the Unicode standard has yet to cover all the possible alphabets used by various ethnic groups in Russia. However, we are working on it by submitting our proposals to the Unicode Consortium and the situation is gradually improving,” he pointed out, adding that his proposal consisted of offering even more opportunities for registering domain names in the .РФ zone using minority languages by adding more Cyrillic characters. Russia’s republics and regions are interested in using these new characters which means that this effort must carry on, the speaker said.
Runity’s head, Andrey Kuzmichev, talked about using the Unified System for Identification and Authentication (USIA) for user identification purposes. As of late September, over 81 percent of new clients seeking domain-related services used USIA every month when working with RuCenter. A total of over 15,000 customers have chosen USIA identification since this option’s launch.
“These figures leave no doubt that what users want is convenience and security. We will now scale-up this positive practice. Our next goal is to offer USIA authentication at Reg.ru, the country’s biggest registrar, by the end of 2025. This will start with the hosting services, and after that we will expand this practice to cover domains,” Andrey Kuzmichyov pointed out.
Director General of the Technical Center of Internet Alexey Rogdev shared data about the active TLS certificates in the .RU domain. The number of websites with TLS certificates has increased from 30 to 80 percent over the past five years. Still, three foreign certification authorities command a 99 percent market share.
“On the one hand, the Russian internet benefits from better protections, while its security hinges upon foreign certification authorities,” Alexey Rogdev said, adding that reducing the validity period for the Let’s Encrypt TLS certificates, which control over 80 percent of the market, down to 90 and then to 47 days had a negative bearing on network stability.
Any failure in renewals can pose a system-wide threat for millions of websites.
“Using Russia IT products, including Russian TLS certificates, is a strategic imperative for all major platforms and services working in our country. This ensures our immunity in the face of political factors and decisions by foreign jurisdictions, while also guaranteeing that the national digital environment is stable and secure,” Alexey Rogdevs said.
In his remarks, Yevgeny Morozov, MSK-IX’s Director General, talked about the way efforts to localize DNS traffic and transfer it to Russian servers affect safety within the Russian internet. He noted that 90 percent of web traffic stays within the national borders. As for Integral Research Institute’s Deputy Director, Igor Sviridov, he delivered a presentation titled Linguistic and Cultural Transfers Online as a State Influence Tool.
This ended the roundtable discussion, but not the ADT conference. The Coordination Center has a stand at its venue where participants can learn about the Center’s projects and initiatives, as well as get souvenirs.
