Russia marking Internet Day.

MOSCOW, September 30 (Itar-Tass) - Numerous users of Runet, the
Russian-language segment of the worldwide web, are marking the Internet
Day on Wednesday, September 30.

The date is not an officially registered professional or public event
yet and it is largely the product of a public initiative, which quite well
falls in line with the Internet's highly democratic spirit.
It is believed that the Internet was incepted in 1969 in the U.S.
where a computer network was designed for a reliable transmission of data
during a nuclear war.
From that time on, the Internet has been developing quite successfully
and it covers more than a quarter of the entire humankind today.
The first Soviet/Russian domain name - SU - was registered in 1990,
and on April 4, 1994, Russia's national domain RU went into effect.
This coming winter, the Russian community of web users expects the
arrival of the national Cyrillic domain RF.
Over the decades that have elapsed since its advent, the Internet has
turned into an inalienable asset of life for many Russians. Like in all
other parts of the planet, the worldwide web has transformed into a mass
information medium, a place where people do business, familiarize
themselves with culture, or simply maintain interpersonal communications.
The Ministry of Telecommunications says that 47 million Russians used
Internet at the beginning of 2009. Forecasts indicate the figure may go up
by a third in the next twelve months.
In March 2009, a two-millionth website with the "ru" domain name was
registered.
The year-by-year study of the number of users reveals a steep upward
dynamics, as the Runet community numbered a mere 12 to 14 million users in
2004 and only a million users in 1998.
Also, Russia has impressive achievements in this sphere, like the
internationally recognized brand of the Kaspersky Laboratory anti-virus
agency or the Russian-language portal Yandex that confidently competes
with Google.
Almost all schools in this country have computers connected to the
Internet.
In the meantime, the web has a broad space for development and
improvement in Russia.
Although more than a third of customers enjoy broadband access, the
connection speed in most urban centers here, except Moscow and St
Petersburg, remains rather slow.
The volume of Russia's e-market totaled 1.5 billion U.S. dollars in
2008 and e-commerce stood at around 2.5 billion dollars. Although the
figures are not bad, they stand far behind the global standards that show
hundreds of billions of dollars.
Many other countries have Internet days of their own and most
frequently their dates are indicative of some events linked to the
introduction of the Internet in one or another country.
As for the international date, the title of the World Day of the
Internet may by claimed by April 4.
On that day, the Roman Catholic Church venerates the St Isidore of
Seville, a Spanish bishop who lived in the 6th and 7th centuries. This
scientist of the early Christian era is believed to be the patron saint of
the worldwide web.

.Russian parties to mark Internet Day by contacts with bloggers.

MOSCOW, September 30 (Itar-Tass) - Practically all of Russia's
political parties are going to demonstrate their commitment to the
worldwide web as Russia marks Internet Day on Wednesday.
Official websites that all the registered parties have long opened
them for the purposes of mass communications report on a variety of
actions devoted to this feast of technological sophistication.
The United Russia Party hopes to lay the foundation of a new tradition
- the annual meeting of party leaders with bloggers of the party's own
social network that was set up about a year ago in the framework of
renovation of the party's Internet portal. The latter was officially
presented at United Russia's congress last fall.
The resource for debates has been named 'The Lair' in line with the
party symbolic that refers to bears.
In another festive action, the party will register its 'er.ru' portal
as a mass media.
Pressing issues in the development of blogs as a sector of activity in
the Russian segment of the Internet will come into the focus of a
conversation that Sergei Mironov, the leader of the Fair Russia party and
also the speaker of the upper house of parliament, will have with bloggers.
Mironov has every right to discuss Runet in detail, as he himself is
an active blogger. His diary in the Live Journal is popular not only among
reporters covering the parliament.
An advocate of a law on the Internet, Mironov is also quite vehement
as regards the denial of any censorship in the Internet. "The law on the
Internet should regulate the providers' operations but it shouldn't
restrict the rights of ordinary users to expressing their opinions," he
says.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party
/LDPR/ will most obviously appear at his blog on the mail.ru mailing
portal. As for his party's official site, it has long turned into an extra
rostrum for airing his very offbeat ideas and postulations.
The site also contains the contests of poems and toasts.
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation does not plan any
special actions on this improvised holiday, yet it is mastering the
virtual spaces as courageously as other parties do.
A short while ago, the party's presidium issued an instruction to all
of its regional branches to create their own websites and called on the
rank-and-file party members to start embedding themselves actively in all
the social networks.
Practically right on the eve of the new - and still informal - holiday
Ivan Melnikov, the Communist Party's Vice Chairman said at a session of
the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe: "Internet offers much
in terms of socialization but it will never replace the genuine /human/
socialization."
The Right Cause party and the Andrei Gogdanov Center that affiliated
with it recently plan holding an action in Moscow in support of the
'electronic government'. As if they were echoing President Dmitry
Medvedev, members of these parties indicate that the electronic government
will raise the quality of operations of state agencies and, above all,
will become an efficient mechanism of fighting with bureaucracy,
corruption and red-tape arbitrariness.
-0-kle