National treasure: runet Day at the RUSSIA EXPO

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Russia is among the top 6 countries in terms of the number of sites registered with a .RU domain, overtaking France, Italy and China. Today, our country ranks first in Europe in terms of the number of users of the World Wide Web. Since 2019, the volume of the Runet economy has grown by 3.5 times. Such figures were voiced by Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Dmitry Chernyshenko at the plenary session "How Runet has Changed in 30 years", which was held at the RUSSIA EXPO on Runet Day.

"President Vladimir Putin has set a task — to drastically improve the quality of Internet access services by 2030, to provide high-speed access for 97% of households, including on the basis of satellite and mobile networks. As part of the national goal for digital transformation set by the head of state, 86.4% of households have already received broadband Internet access," said Dmitry Chernyshenko, Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation.

He also emphasized that over the past three decades, the Russian Internet has come a really long way towards the creation of an independent information infrastructure and numerous digital services that have already become commonplace for everyone. All this allowed to avoid the hegemony of foreign services and popularize Russian solutions. As a result, for 30 years of its existence Runet has become one of the most developed in the global network in the world, emphasized the Deputy Prime Minister.

The plenary session was moderated by VKontakte's design director Artemy Lebedev.

"The first people who created websites in the .RU zone made them in English. Since it seemed that the Internet is an international network. Then a simple bet was made on the Russian language, Russian sites, Russian content," said Artemy Lebedev.

Andrei Vorobyov, director of the National Domains Coordination Center, shared with the audience the stories about Runet told by its "old-timers", talked about the formation and development of the national global network, and presented the dynamics of growth in the number of domains in the .RU zone.

"Over the three decades Runet has become a real national treasure, the road to this was quite difficult and thorny. On June 25, 1994, the first site in the .RU zone was created — www.ru. The first domain names were so long that they were written in two school notebooks. In 2023, .RU became the growth leader among all national domains and is among the top 10 leading national domains of the world, and in 2024 there will be 5.6 million domains in the .RU zone," said Andrei Vorobyov.

As part of Runet Day, the national video hosting service RUTUBE, part of Gazprom-Media Holding, will hold the First National Phoenix Award at the RUSSIA EXPO. It will be solemnly awarded to those who have successfully revived on the Russian platform under unprecedented pressure from unfriendly countries. Among the nominees are Maria Zakharova, Dmitry Puchkov, Artemy Lebedev, Sanya in Florida, Channel One Holding, NTV, REN, and SPAS TV channels.

The large educational program of Runet Day includes many lectures and masterclasses for guests of all ages, games, quizzes and other activities.