Domain industry representatives from CIS and Eastern Europe meet in Latvia

JURMALA - On September 12-13, 2018, Jurmala (Latvia) hosted the 11th International Conference for ccTLD registries and registrars of CIS, Central and Eastern Europe (TLDCON 2018) organized by the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ with support of NIC.LV, the Technical Center of Internet (TCI) and ICANN. The conference was attended by over 120 domain experts from Russia, Latvia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Serbia, the US, Canada, Ireland, the Czech Republic and other countries. This year the agenda included domain space security, relations between the industry and copyright holders, ccTLD development and new DNS technologies.

Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrei Vorobyov presented the organization’s strategy and priorities for 2019–2021 at the plenary session. Traditionally, domain space security is one of the priorities, so Vorobyov noted the center’s work with specialised agencies. He said that these agencies make industry self-regulation efficient and effective.

Security was also discussed at the ‘Security: Domain Name vs Content’ session that opened the conference program and included presentations by representatives from ICANN, SDF Canadian analytic center, iThreat US cybercrime investigation agency, Group-IB and TCI. The discussions were somewhat reminiscent of the storyline from the movie Minority Report (2002): can a crime be prevented while a suspect is only planning it and can criminals be identified by characteristic mistakes?

The participants concluded that it was necessary to adopt a cyber expert code to regulate responsibility for the expertise they carry out that is used in decision making. All the participants – registrars, registries, providers and law enforcement agencies – need not only to follow the law but also to use common sense in considering how blocking content can affect internet coherence regardless of their approaches to countering illegal content.

A heated discussion on recognizing registrars as information intermediaries with the right to block websites at a copyright holders’ demand without a court ruling took place in the session on legal issues of domain name registration.

For the first time, TLDCON saw a presentation by law firm Semenov&Pevzner who represent the interests of such copyright holders as Warner Music and Sony Music in Russia. Experts from Russia, Belarus, Serbia and Ukraine shared their experiences in resolving domain disputes related to copyright complaints in their countries. They noted that it was necessary to further involve copyright holders in the discussion of current problems and to improve their internet skills. The participants agreed that the main strategy in this area was to create and distribute educational programs on this subject.

The use of advanced approaches in domain marketing was another agenda item at the conference. This was discussed at the Second Wind of ccTLDs session. The influence of new domains on traditional general and national domains can be felt without doubt, and more attention needs to be paid to new technology and data driven marketing to build growth in the domain market: for example, using big data to prepare marketing strategies, carry out comprehensive analysis and work carefully on sales statistics.

At the New Technologies in DNS session, the experts talked about using blockchain technology in DNS and domain name systems for authentication in the Internet of Things as well as security problems. Everyone believes that today DNS is facing a unique situation: its importance in internet management cannot be overrated, but at the same time many of its technological concepts belong to the era of the “open internet” and must be updated. The participants presented practical cases of DNS use in the various areas of telecommunications and the interaction of new and traditional technologies.

TLDCON 2018 concluded with a meeting of the Registrars Club featuring representatives from Russian, Czech and Armenian registrars and registries as well as an ICANN representative. The participants, including representatives of Russian and foreign registrars, talked about their organizations and what modern development trends they considered the most important. The main emphasis in recent years was on the fact that the conference had become a networking platform for national registries and registrars.

In conclusion Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrei Vorobyov thanked the participants and announced that TLDCON 2019 would be held in Lithuania.