On April 5-6 ICANN held the international conference on security and trust in Moscow (organised by RANS - The Russian Association for Networks and Services).

ICANN were represented by Theresa Swinehart - VP Global Partnership, board members Steve Crocker and Steve Goldstein and the regional representative for Russia. Various meetings were held (among them academicians Velikhov and Belyaev at the Kurchatov Institute). They also met people running the .ru country code top level domain name, (among them Alexei Platonov, Alexei Soldatov, Andrey Romanov, Dmitriy Burkov, Mikhail Yakushev, and others).

The ITU was represented by Houlin Zhao, (elected as deputy Secretary-General). The Russian Internet Forum had a gathering of around 2200 people at Lesnie Dali, (near Moscow’s Borviha, and Gorki-2).

Steve Crocker and Steve Goldstein held presentations in the main conference event, (whilst Theresa Swinehart had a keynote address at the opening and closing). She was also among guests at the ITU training centre opening (at the Moscow Technical University).

Moscow growing at a substantial speed. The RANS conference, (with key representatives from governmental and educational institutions), and the RIF (with 2200 participants, workshops, conferences, seminars, and exhibition) prove that the East has its own, important place in the global Internet culture.

New meetings are coming up in Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Uzbekistan. The work of the regional liaisons is sometimes difficult to describe. e.g. ICANN signed with domains for .ru (an accountability framework) before the Conference. The work behind this is enormous, and it took a long time). Communication with the Internet community in any country is not always easy (they need to know what ICANN is, how they can contribute, what ICANN can do for them, and what they can do for ICANN). There are cross-cultural issues, language issues, possibly lots of history which need to be navigated through. In a constantly changing environement ICANN have to adapt and find the right way to move on.

"My first visit in Moscow was in 1979 (I’ve written some short memories about it, in Bulgarian), and I’ve been there in the 90s several times - that was indeed a strange time - everything was falling apart, the airplane tickets from Sofia to Moscow were $ 10, and I couldn’t miss the opportunity to watch Asia live. I have a number of friends and colleagues there. In 1994 my Bulgarian ISP was using as an uucp gateway over X.25 a company called GlasNet - the first Russian private Internet provider. I’ve interviewed a number of Russian writers, among them Yuri Astafiev, Ivan Stadnyuk, Inna Markovna Saburova (she was also wife of the late army general Alexandar Saburov, one of the famous Russian partisan commanders-in-chief from the time of the Second World War, who later became Member of the Parliament, and served as a deputy minister of interior), who was an interpreter from/to Bulgarian, and a good family friend."