Problems of IDN domains affect millions of people all over the world

The first session at TLDCON 2016 was dedicated to the main topic of the conference – IDN domains. Representatives of top-level domains that use national alphabets – Cyrillic .УКР, .ДЕТИ, .СРБ, .БЕЛ, .САЙТ, .ОНЛАЙН and a Georgian IDN domain .გე participated in the session. Every speaker talked about the development of their domain, what difficulties it faced and what interesting solutions they managed to find. As it turned out, one of the main problems of IDN domains are difficulties with IDN support, which are still evidenced when it comes to mailing systems and social networks. This is why registries decided to ask them to keep working on support of IDN. The webpage of the petition http://idnpetition.net/ has already been launched, where it’s possible to read the full text of the document. Registries of all top-level domains in national languages can join the petition – this problem affects not only Cyrillic domains, but all other IDN as well.

“At the moment there are about 900 thousand names registered in .РФ domain, which is the most popular one among all IDN domains. The domain develops steadily and shows annual increase of 3-4%. The main factor that limits its development is the impossibility to use fully Cyrillic email addresses. It is a common problem for all Cyrillic domains and IDN domains in general. The initiative of .БЕЛ, .УКР and .РФ registries to sign a petition addressed to mailing services and social networks has already found supporters among registries of other IDN domains”, said Director at Coordination Center for TLD RU/РФ Andrei Vorobyev.

Participants of the session also highlighted that IDN problems don’t only affect interests of individual domain administrators; they affect interests of tens of millions of people who use these domains. If mailing services and social networks that exist today don’t pay due attention to this issue, the niche will be occupied by new companies that will be more flexible.

Attendees of the session “Information security” talked about the increased share of encrypted traffic. Maarit Palovirta (ISOC) provided interesting figures: “86% of incoming connections and 76% of outgoing in Google are protected by encryption. In the last two years a lot of operators encrypted their traffic.” Dmitry Belyavsky (TCI) talked in detail how to use one of the most popular Internet protocols – DNS – for data protection. Benedict Addis (Shadowserver) explained how Shadowserver that deals with security issues of the domain space in the UK works. Turned out that it’s working scheme is very similar to the one adopted by Netoscope, Coordination Center’s project. Linda Muller (Iron DNS) shared the experience of introducing ISO certificate. John Crain talked about how ICANN provides reliability, stability and resilience of the Internet in the world. He pointed out how important the work of volunteers from different countries was and invited experts from Russia and other countries of the region to participate.

The first day of TLDCON 2016 finished with a session on international organizations and domain space. Alexandra Kulikova and Mukesh Chulani (ICANN), Katrina Sataki (ccNSO) and Leonid Todorov (APTLD) talked about the operation of their organizations and future plans related to their work with CIS and Eastern Europe as well. Katrina Sataki invited conference attendees to participate more actively in the work of ICANN.

On September 8th TLDCON 2016 will continue its work. Follow our news