The main topic of the TLDCON 2016 – development and support of IDN domains

9th International Conference for ccTLD registries and registrars of CIS, Central and Eastern Europe (TLDCON 2016) started in Tbilisi on September 7th. This year’s conference will most probably be the largest ever – by the number of participants and also by the number of countries represented at the conference. Almost 150 people from 22 countries of the world have registered.

The TLDCON 2016 opened with a speech of the Director of ccTLD RU/РФ Andrei Vorobyev. He pointed out that lots of issues to be discussed during the conference are the same for CIS countries, Central and Eastern Europe, that is for all participants of the TLDCON. One of the main topics mentioned by Andrei Vorobyev was development of IDN domains. During the conference it is planned to consider the address to world mailing services and social networks in order for them to continue their work to support IDN. Director of TLD RU/РФ also announced that TLDCON 2017 would take place in one of the Central Asian countries.

“Domain .RU ranks 6th in the top-10 ccTLDs. We are working to get ahead of the Netherlands’ domain .NL and rise to a higher position in this ranking. Domain .РФ remains one of the most popular among IDN domains and keeps growing”, said Andrei Vorobyev.

Spokesman of the Georgia’s ccTLD .GE registry Genadi Rostomauli and representative of the National Commission for Communications of Georgia Mzia Gogilashvili greeted the conference attendees in Tbilisi and talked about the development of the Internet space in Georgia and how Georgian Internet community is involved in this development.

ICANN’s Vice President for Russia, CIS and Eastern Europe Michael Yakushev talked about the tendencies in the development of the world domain space. “Technology development, emergence of social networks and development of the new systems of Internet search, it seems, makes development of the domain name system meaningless: it turns out the name of the webpage is not that important if it can be easily found using a search engine. However, recent events show that it is not like this: demand for domain names is higher than ever and existence of the domain in the national zone is to some extent a guarantee of information’s reliability and a guarantee that it is possible to find who owns the domain. Everybody knows about search engine optimization, therefore, unfortunately, when looking for an organization using a search engine there is no guarantee to find the webpage of the correct organization rather than a resource, which belongs to those who paid to appear the first in the search results.”

Michael Yakushev also said that the final stage of IANA transition is on the way. According to him, from October 1st 2016 IANA functions will not be controlled by the American government anymore and will be transferred to a new multistakeholder structure. Another issue that interests many conference participants is the date when a second round of the New gTLD program is going to be launched. ICANN’s Vice President said that it would probably be possible to submit applications in 2017, he urged everyone to take an active part in this program.

Technical Center of Internet’s Director Alexei Platonov highlighted a big role that TLDCON conference plays in the development of the domain space in the region: “Our virtual world reflects the real world: it’s economy, politics, etc. Everything develops in a spiral, at the next turn we see strengthening of the role of national states and from powerful globalization we move towards no less powerful regionalization. We see that domain .РФ turned out to be very popular and it competes with traditional ccTLDs in Latin. Neighbors need to communicate, especially those structures that develop national segments of the Internet. We have enough to talk about and share.”