The Fifth Russian Internet Governance Forum (RIGF-2014) has opened in Moscow. It is hosted by the Coordination Center for TLD RU/РФ and the Technical Center of Internet and supported by RAEC and ICANN.

Coordination Center Director Andrei Kolesnikov said at the forum’s opening that the day also marked the 20th anniversary of the .RU domain and the first day of registration of the new Cyrillic domain zone, .ДЕТИ. He presented a new ICANN Vice President for Russia, the CIS and Eastern Europe, and Member of the Council of the Coordination Center Mikhail Yakushev, and thanked Veni Markovski, who held this post until March 2014, for long-term cooperation. Now he will assume the role of Vice President of Global Stakeholder Engagement, which means that he will work closely with UN agencies and also missions to the UN.

Petr Sich, Head of the Council of Europe Program Office in Russia, spoke about the CoE’s vision of the future Internet and the contribution of CoE countries to its development. Mr. Sich pointed out that such global human values as democracy, human rights and the rule of law are important both in everyday life and on the net. He believes that the Internet must not be governed by any one country or group of persons, but by a group consisting of representatives from different sides.

Marina Nikerova, Deputy General Director of the Technical Center of Internet, recalled the not so distant past. “Just think how much has changed, in particular in technology, and how all of us have grown in the past 20 years,” she said. “We have nurtured .RU to maturity and are now giving the same treatment to .РФ. And today we will launch one more [Cyrillic] domain, .ДЕТИ.”

Other congratulatory speeches were delivered by Ruslan Gattarov, Deputy Governor of the Chelyabinsk Region; Axel Pawlik, Managing Director of the RIPE Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC); Faig Farmanov (Azerbaijan), Director of the ISP IntraNS, the registrar of the .AZ domain; and Le Nam Trung, Deputy Director of Vietnam Internet Network Information Center (VNNIC), the registrar of the .VN domain.

This year, the RIGF order For Services to the Internet has been awarded to Olaf Kolkman (Netherlands), Director of NLnet Labs and former chair of the Internet Architecture Board, who will deliver a special address on Internet Architecture as the Basis of Future Innovation. It will begin at 5 pm and will top off the forum’s agenda.

You can listen to the forum’s speeches online on the RIGF 2014 site.