Agenda

With the BRICS summit in a Russian city of Ufa in the summer 2015 around the corner, some may argue that the bottom-up, multistakeholder driven procedures have fallen short of becoming a universal Internet Governance instrument for the BRICS countries. The expert panel representing the BRIC nations will discuss commonalities and peculiarities in approaches to Internet Governance, and mechanisms to promote good practices which may further cement those nations’ common stance towards the problem.

Though Sting may raise brows at the panel’s name, he would definitely agree the Internet as a common technical platform constantly gives rise to a plethora of new technological advancements that keep revolutionizing the cyber space. At the panel session, Russian and foreign technological gurus and pundits will share their vision of the direction the Internet is going to take and major breakthroughs and tiny but critical improvements which should make it possible.

Is the Internet business community’s voice heard of as it should be while shaping the public policy? Are governments indeed listening and keen to promote environment conducive to the industry behemoths and tiny start-ups alike? Are moves like promotion of a sound net neutrality, jurisdictional aspects, taxation of globalized internet businesses and internet trade just all a hype or a serious matter to concern and what could the industry do to make them happen right? These and other issues will be debated at the session by government and business representatives.

Has it ever dawned on you how popular the Cyrillic script is and how many nations use it to mark their presence in the cyber space? No matter what you’d think, at RIGF-2015, we expect the first ever “summit” of the Cyrillic internationalized country-code top level domains to highlight on their success stories and new challenges ahead, and dot the i's (if there any) and cross the t's (or none of them) when it comes to a long-awaited solution to the Universal Acceptance problem.