Runet celebrates its 25th anniversary
On May 27, a new issue of the Internet Inside magazine came out. It is devoted to the Russian national domain and events to celebrate its anniversary. «Although we consider April 7, 1994 to be the day the Runet was born, it is as difficult to connect a concrete event, for instance, the delegation of .RU, with the emergence of the internet in Russia as it is to connect one of the many development stages of the global internet with its birthday. This is one of the fundamental features of the internet: the interaction of independent networks without a central government. Given all this, it is hard to find a historical decision or a document that orders the turn-on of the internet,» Andrei Robachevsky said in his editorial. «In any case, April 1994 is an important stage of the development of the internet in Russia, as well as January 1983, when the internet received the TCP/IP protocols.»
The 11th issue also includes an essay by Alexei Platonov, one of the creators of the Runet. He shared his memories about the beginning of the new era: «This story is related to the .ru domain. The Russian Institute of Public Networks (RIPN) became the coordinator of the RELARN project and in a short space of time gained reputation both in the scientific and education community and among internet operators (who in fact serviced the community in the beginning) as a neutral, non-commercial organization that worked in the interests of society and the state. In fact, RIPN became a point of trust (which we highly valued) around which it became possible to agree on issues important for the internet community in general. The decisions were related to .ru, and later, in 1995, to the creation of Russia’s first internet exchange points. As a result, all parties agreed that RIPN would perform the functions of the administrator of .ru, and also provide its maintenance. The state, represented by the State Committee for Science and Higher Education, did not object.
Given that no agency was charged with the development of the internet in Russia at that stage, we stopped there. The protocol of agreement was signed by all important (at that time) internet operators and sent to IANA, and then .ru was delegated. Technical assistance, including DNS, was provided by Relcom (as part of sponsor support), but soon a technical center was created by Russian experts employed by RIPN,» Platonov writes.
The issue also includes standard sections, such as Research, where one can read about the internet services using the BGP protocol. In the Politics section Madina Kasenova writes about the improvement of national security. She prepared a review, The US Cyberstrategy for 2018. The Internet in Numbers tells readers about website statistics, IETF and the stability of the DNS infrastructure. We also recommend the section Domain Industry News, which is especially interesting in this anniversary year.
To download the magazine, go to link. You also can read all the articles in blog format and comment on them here.
