TLDCON 2014 focuses on cybersecurity and legal regulations

The second day of the TLDCON 2014 conference opened with the panel, Legal Aspects of Global Internet Development. Moderator Katrina Sataki (.LV) invited the panel members to discuss how legal regulations vary across countries and national domains, and how domain disputes are resolved in national legislative systems. Today, there are 285 ccTLDs operating in the Internet, of which 36 are IDN domains. Distributed registration is available for 85 percent of national domains, i.e. relationships are built between registries and registrars. Even though all the TLDs follow a single policy of how to address legal issues, each national domain has specific enforcement techniques. Sergei Kopylov (ccTLD .RU/.РФ) and Maria Malysheva (Technical Center Internet) spoke about the latest trends in resolving domain disputes in Russia and the interaction between the courts that issue rulings and registrars who must comply with such rulings.

Remarks by Mikhail Yakushev (ccTLD .RU/.РФ), who issued a detailed forecast on the future of the Internet up until 2020 sparked a heated debate. Participants expressed a variety of opinions about the future of the domains and online brands, the expansion of communications and technology merging, and the prospects for expanding national domain areas. The meeting was also attended by Joke Braeken (EURid), Zaur Zeynalov (independent IT expert), Daiva Tamulioniene (.LT) and Thomas Maskus (.LT).

Renowned experts spoke during the technical session, Security and DNS. Pavel Khramtsov discussed how cybersecurity is impacted by the Netoskop Project created in 2013 by the Coordination Center. According to Khramtsov, efforts to eliminate bad domains resulted in a drop in the center’s proceeds. However, Netoskop has helped make the Russian domain space cleaner, securer and more stable.

Technical Center Internet employees Dmitry Belyavsky, Dmitry Kovalenko and Valery Temnikov presented different aspects of the TCI providing information security in the Russian domain space. As many may be aware, the Technical Center Internet supports seven top-level Russian domains, such as .RU, .РФ, .SU, .ДЕТИ, .TATAR, .MOSCOW and .МОСКВА, and is Europe’s largest specialized technical center. Mikhail Kozlov (Satellite), Anton Baskov (RIPE NCC) and Elmar Knipp (IronDNS) also addressed the panel.

The closing session was moderated by ICANN Vice President and Member of the Board of the Coordination Center Mikhail Yakushev and focused on IDN domains and problems concerning the variability of spelling, which have arisen as these domains have spread across the world. The alphabets that are used to write the domain names include many similar characters that might cause addressing errors. Sarmad Hussain (ICANN) spoke about the difficulties involved in reading fonts by the IDN TLD program and how this problem is addressed by the international community. Yury Kargapolov (UANIC) and Jaap Akkerhuis (NLnetLabs) also shared their perspectives on this issue.

This concluded the TLDCON 2014 conference. The remarks of conference participants are available for perusal on the conference’s website.