RIGF focused on the Internet of Things

The Bottom Up and Upside Down session focused on Internet governance and the influence of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). The participating experts highlighted the danger of splitting the global network and the venues where issues of Internet governance are discussed.

“The BRICS countries account for 25 percent of global GDP and their aggregate Internet audience is approaching 1 billion people. The BRICS countries can and must more actively contribute to Internet governance, coming closer together in the process,” said Marina Nikerova, deputy director general of Technical Center of Internet and panel moderator.

The participants included Oleg Demidov (Russia), Lucky Masilela (South Africa), Marília Maciel (Brazil), Parminderjeet Singh (India) and Liyun Han (China).

The issue of the Internet of Things (IoT), about which Jari Arkko spoke in his lecture, was later discussed at the session We Share the Same Technology (Regardless of Ideology) moderated by Mikhail Kader (Cisco).

The panel participants included Jari Arkko (IETF), Paul Vixie (Farsight Security, Inc.), Kaveh Ranjbar (RIPE NCC), Pavel Khramtsov (Netoscope) and Andrey Yarnikh (Kaspersky Lab). They agreed that the IoT offers users new opportunities and at the same time creates new information security risks. They also discussed data coding, technical regulation of the Internet and related issues of ensuring national cyber security.

The panel titled Your Call Is Very Important for Us focused on cooperation between the Internet business community and governments. Moderator Karen Kazaryan drew the participants’ attention to a number of questions, including personal data localization and storage, taxation of international online companies, and the concept of net neutrality. Vartan Khachaturov, Alexander Shepilov, Michael Yakushev, Dmitry Marinichev, as well as Frederic Donck (Belgium) and Julien Nocetti (France) took part in the discussion.

This year, registrar representatives of nearly all national Cyrillic domains attended the forum, and so the session Expanding the Cyrillic Universe became a kind of a Cyrillic domain summit. The issues on its agenda – problems and challenges in the Cyrillic zone – were discussed by Mikhail Anisimov (Russia), Iliya Bazlyankov (Bulgaria), Pavel Gusev (Kazakhstan), Saso Dimitrijoski (Macedonia), Yuri Kargapolov (Ukraine), Sergey Povalishev (Belarus) and Dusan Stojicevic (Serbia). They shared their experience of launching new national domains, saying that the problem of Universal Acceptance, in particular the absence of Cyrillic emails, seriously hinder these domains’ full-scale integration in the global domain space. The participants highlighted the importance of protecting trademarks not only in traditional domains, but also in IDN domains, and also discussed the practice and specifics of settling domain disputes in their countries.

That session concluded the forum.