The Fourth Russian Internet Governance Forum has ended in Moscow, Russia, on April 25, 2013.

The Forum was held by the Coordination Center for TLD RU/РФ, and was supported by RAEC and ICANN. The Technical Center of Internet sponsored the event. At a number of roundtables and discussion panels, the attendees were able to discuss topical questions such as cybersecurity, legal aspects of the global network, new gTLDs and changing domain landscape, the Internet for the younger audiences and e-Government projects.

A number of questions related to the Internet regulation was dicsussed at the "Transborder or no borders: Internet and its legal aspects" roundtable. The members of the discussion unanimously think that the multistakeholder principle has to be applied even to the spheres like international public and private law. The human rights issues have to be viewed separately. As Lee Hibbard, a representative of the Council of Europe puts it, the laws are adopted at a very slow pace while the technology rushes forward, and this issue should be considered the major Internet legal problem in the future.

Attendees of the "Creating a playground in the Internet" roundtable, moderated by the Smart Internet Foundation chairman Vladimir Mamontov, shared their thoughts on what is relevant for today's younger audiences and how the Internet community can help them make their first steps in the Internet. All roundtable attendees agreed that today's kids socialize in a totally different way, and the children themselves have changed. The Internet affects kids greatly, while the youth are, as a rule of thumb, much more tech-savvy users than their parents and teachers. However, kids require adults' help and their extensive knowledge, as before. John Carr, a member of the UKCCIS council, says that in Great Britain, a practice to limit improper content in the public Internet spots is now being adopted.

At the "Cybersecurity: evasive virtuality" roundtable, the members of the discussion understood that the cybersecurity issues have to be tackled by businesses, society and governments together, and there is no chance of solving these problems alone as all opinions have to be taken into account. At the global level, the government representatives have to discuss these topical issues as well.

Alena Popova, a moderator of the "e- Government: handiness made possible" discussion panel, asked the attendees to discuss ICT and e- Government practices in various countries. The roundtable members spoke on the best practices they use to provide e-Government services and on how the communities perceive these services. Barbara-Chiara Ubaldi, OECD E-Government project leader, the critical factor here is to educate civil servants so they could, in turn, help citizens to fully leverage new services. "A new culture has to be created in the government sector", she says.

The future of the Internet governance has been discussed widely for more than 10 years, and at the "Prospects of the Internet governance system" session, the experts were able to update the audience on today's Internet governance issues. Veni Markovski, ICANN's VP for stakeholder engagement in Russia, CIS and Eastern Europe, says that there's no substantial controversy between ICANN and ITU: the fact that the opinions differentiated in Dubai shows that all stakeholders are trying their best to facilitate Internet development, and the dialogue between ICANN and ITU continues. Wolfgang Kleinwaechter (University of Aarhus) thinks that in a long-term perspective, including all stakeholders in the dialogue and working on more distributed governance system might help to establish a reliable Internet governance process. At the moment, all stakeholders are working on such set of rules and regulations, and still have to learn more about the process. In the expert circles, the consultations are taking place, while the global organizations work on norms and principles of Internet governance.

The Fourth Russian Internet Governance Forum ended with "Domain industry economy", moderated by Olga Alexandrova-Myasina, the Coordination Center's chief marketing officer. The attendees exchanged opinions on how Russian and global domain space is expanding, as well as on what will the domain industry look like in the nearest future, when hundreds of new gTLDs will be delegated, and spoke on DNSSEC as well. The attendees also agreed that as the new domain names are in demand, new gTLDs might have a bright future. Marina Nikerova (TCI) and Katrina Sataki (NIC.LV) also shared details on TLDStat, a joint project that continues for more than a year and helps the registries to gain insights into their businesses. TLDStat is a Technical Center of Internet project, and Statdom.ru, a Russian statistical domaining resource, is based on it. "TLDStat helps mirroring the domain zone processes", says Marina Nikerova. The .LV TLD was the first non-Russian domain to benefit from the project, and Katrina Sataki agreed that it could help to gain a clear view of the registry – for example, with TLDStat, NIC.LV has been able to find a set of registrant addresses' problems that was previously unknown of. Other registries have also expressed profound interest in TLDStat.