Moscow conference on Internet development in Russia

I was at the RANS confernece in Moscow. Well, almost in Moscow – it was in Vatutinki, 34 km. from Moscow, on the road to Kaluga.

RANS is the governmental-public Russian Association for Networks and Services. It makes every year a great conference. This year it took place at the Vatutinki hotel, which is part of and being run by the Kremlin administration.

The conference is called “State of the art and future of the Internet in Russia”, and is indeed quite a conference!

This year it managed to put together on the same panel two people who have not – until this day – been seen together too often – Paul Twomey, President/CEO of ICANN and Hualin Zhao, director of ITU-TSB.

The talks about the future of the Internet were not limited only to the Russian borders. All discussions showed that there are new players  on the Internet market – Russia, and the Russian neighbours. They produce a lot of new content, in cyrillic (sic!), and they use all new technologies to make sure the Internet comes to everyone.

What I was impressed with? Many things.

Check some of them out:

Arkady Volozh, the Yandex CEO gave me some data: Google has only 8 % of the Internet advertising market in Russia! (Yandex has 60 %)
Arkady Kremer, chariman of RANS, is a great organizer, and visionary about his country. His name was well mentioned by different participants as the driving engine of the confernce, and of the RANS.
Luisa Rizmanova from the Regional Commonwealth in the field of Communications (RCC) knows every country in the region – including Bulgaria.
Kira Litvina of the .ru ccTLD was quite well informed about the ICANN – ccTLD relations.

Russia is moving quite quickly on the road, and the oil money obviously have some positive effect, too.

You can see some pictures from the conference at my flickr page.

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P.S. Moscow’s roads are full with cars, and the airport Sheremetievo-2 is being reconstructed. One point for visitors – don’t get the first taxi they offer you; if you walk by the counters, the last one is of the official Moscow taxi company. Don’t charge it to your credit card – it’s more expensive compared to paying in cash. And there are ATM machines everywhere, so this is convinient.