The second day of the DIDS 2017 conference, on 8^th March, hosted the Regional Internet Forum, RIF 2017, which for the third year running brought together representatives of national Internet registries from the countries of south-eastern Europe, as well as professionals from state institutions, local Internet communities and global Internet organisations. This year RIF gathered together some 70 participants, who discussed a variety of topics and exchanged their experiences regarding the creation and marketing of online content, as well as adapting the activities of national registries to the changing regulatory and security environment.

In the first block of RIF 2017, creative strategist Lazar Džamić gave a talk on content marketing, and the challenges faced by national Internet domain registries in presenting to users exactly what it is they do, in an interesting and authentic way.  “The trick is to tell a ‘boring’ story in an interesting way. The power of drama should not be underestimated, and the story of Internet domains actually has great dramatic potential – there is opportunity there, a chance to achieve the goals we have set ourselves, and to provide benefit to others,” said Džamić, explaining that it was of vital importance that a message intended for users not only communicate the benefits of the service on offer but also carry a certain emotional weight.

Working on a common task

However, for that message to be properly formulated we first need to determine what the most important roles are that national Internet domain registries play for society as a whole, especially in the light of constant regulatory, technological and security-related change. In a panel debate moderated by Slobodan Marković, RNIDS Adviser for ICT Policy and Internet Community Relations, representatives of national Internet domain registries from all over the south-east European region shared experiences regarding their relationships and partnership with state institutions and other interested parties within local Internet communities.

“Most ccTLD registries began in the form of autonomous entities, but along the way have had to adapt their structure and their goals in line with regulatory demands. Although there is no Internet domain law in Serbia, RNIDS’ activities are governed by other laws such as the Law on Foundations, as well as through its own memorandum of association, which was modelled on those of similar institutions in Europe,” Marković said. He added that RNIDS was in daily contact with members of the Serbian Internet community, in order to be able to take an active part – in liaison with legislators – in creating a modern and well-regulated Internet environment in the country.

Barbara Povše Golob, head of the Slovene .si registry within ARNES, agrees that registries share a common role in taking part in the legislative process. “In order to achieve this, registries must first be reliable, useful and secure,” she said.

Delegates from the Romanian Internet community reported that a public debate was currently under way regarding key questions that will determine the role the Romanian national Internet registry is to play in the future. Some of those questions include who the national registry can be, whether its budget should be transparent and should Internet domains be confiscated sometimes – and how this should be done.

Our colleagues from Croatia said that in order to improve communication with end users they had launched websites and online forums where all interested parties could share their ideas and suggestions for better administration of the Internet in that country. This strategy, which involves including the public at large and not just Internet professionals, has resulted in a much greater influx of feedback.

Security first

Vladimir Radunović, director of educational programmes in the areas of Internet governance, cyber-security and e-diplomacy at Diplo Foundation, moderated the next panel debate, which was devoted to reviewing current trends in Internet security and the challenges facing ccTLD registries, as well as best practices in this area.

Oli Schacher, from the Swiss SWITCH-CERT, talked about DNS infrastructure security and the latest improvements in protection, and then Žarko Kecić, Chief Technical Officer at RNIDS, presented successful practices of the Serbian national Internet domain registry thus far. “In the ten years since its establishment, RNIDS’ servers have worked every day with no interruptions or major issues, despite facing DDOS and DNS attacks during that time,” Kecić said. He said that in such situations a timely reaction was the most important thing, together with the use of the latest forms of protection available.

In addition to this, all participants in the dialogue concluded that in order to act effectively in future situations of this kind, mutual cooperation between all regional ccTLD registries would be of great benefit, as well as continued education of end users regarding online threats.

Regional partnership

The last section of the programme, led by Barbara Povše Golob, was about just that: joint action, and also the impact of new EU regulations and ICANN rules on ccTLD registries. Gorazd Božič, her colleague from ARNES and director of SI-CERT, said that all EU member states would soon be faced with a new package of regulatory measures (the NIS Directive and the GDPR), which would require them to make appropriate adaptations to their Internet management policies. “Some countries are preparing more rapidly and effectively for these new measures than others, and the collective experiences from their positive practice will soon be shared with all EU member states, which should contribute to a more rapid and coordinated implementation of the new directive,” said Božić.

The last part of this year’s RIF was give over to constructive dialogue and exchange of experiences between all participants in resolving the legal and management issues that faced national Internet domain registries. A video report from the RIF 2017 meeting will be made available at rif.rs.

The first day of the eighth annual DIDS conference for 2017, organised by the Serbian National Internet Domain Registry Foundation (RNIDS), was devoted to uncovering the secrets of the Internet search machinery, most often personified in Google. The slogan for this year’s DIDS was “Internet Search Secrets: Search, Find, Visit“, with the all-day programme at the Metropol Palace Hotel on 7^th March attended by 400 visitors at the venue, but also watched by more than 5,000 people via the online stream.

In the first segment of the DIDS programme, titled From Google’s Angle, the audience heard from Gary Illyes, webmaster trends analyst with Google Inc. Illyes spoke from his years of experience in developing organic search and internationalising the services of this giant of the ICT industry, noting that Google’s goal was to display the content that is most relevant to users around the world, according to their location, which usually means content in the local language. For example, to a user searching the Serbian Cyrillic .СРБ domain. “In order to achieve the best possible web search accuracy and performance, Google tracks the most important ranking signals, such as keywords, the language used and the current ranking of the web page. However, you can’t make a fixed list of factors that affect search results the same way on every occasion – they are case-by-case,” said Illyes.

Adaptation is the key to success

Lazar Džamić, creative strategist of international renown, until recently head of Google’s ZOO team for brand strategy, opened the second segment of the programme, called Find Me Easy. Džamić tried to give an answer to the question of how content creation and search optimisation on the Internet can work to benefit one another more successfully in a time when, as he put it, it is easy to be ignored.

“All modern marketing is mass-orientated, direct and digitally mediated. This is a change to the earlier paradigm we had all become accustomed to; after this, only those who have adapted quickly will survive, because the world has become a brutal place. Money follows interest. But this interest must be earned in order to be successfully monetised at some point. However many companies with a web presence – including even some of the biggest players – often take the wrong approach, and opt to create large volumes of content instead of focusing on quality. The fact is that well-crafted content offers far more opportunity for successful optimisation,” Džamić explained.

This is especially true when you consider the fact that as much as 54% of the average digital media advertising budget is squandered because it is not used in an effective way. However for quality content to create the desired impact, it is of vital importance to ensure it is targeted towards the right group.

That was the topic of Miroslav Varga’s talk. Miroslav is an expert in tracking AdWords campaigns with the Croatian company Escape. “Successful advertisers stand out from the crowd because they recognise – on time – what the top priority is when crafting an offer for their chosen audience. The advertiser needs to persuade consumers to buy his products using limited space and the least number of words. In this process, the management of advertising companies must have an awareness of the needs of their target groups – to ‘stand in their shoes’ for a moment. When we write an ad targeted to our ageing Auntie Nora,” said Varga, by way of colourful example, ”we first need to draw her on the wall and then sit down and come up with advertising that she will easily understand.”

He observed that an advertising message, apart from being appropriate, also had to be as authentic as possible – that was very important: “The customer sometimes needs to be ‘taught’ what to Google. If everyone is advertising the same thing then you need to come up with a new catchphrase for them to Google.” Only then can you move onto studying the algorithm itself, i.e. technical tweaking,” said Varga.

Authenticity, first and foremost

During the third part of the programme the audience had a chance to see some “Good examples of Internet presence” from the Serbian scene, through the stories of successful home-grown entrepreneurs who saw and took their opportunity to draw in new users through a modern and original Internet presence. Sharing their experiences were representatives of superskola.rs, gradnja.rs, lespetits.rs, mojazubarka.rs, alibris.rs, the company Benchmark and the Belgrade Philharmonia.

“It was the quest to get early tickets for Philharmonia performances that got our oldest subscribers using the Internet. In establishing communication with them online, our decision to be present both on the Latin-script .RS and the Cyrillic-script .СРБ domains absolutely proved to be the right choice. It reflected our desire to be authentic and to cultivate our linguistic tradition,” said Bojan Stanković, social networks coordinator for the Belgrade Philharmonia.

The upcoming generations also have good reason to become part of an online community – the site superskola.rs (SuperSchool) is committed to providing pupils of the upper grades of primary school with informal assistance in their education, through more than 80 different online tests, 1,500 exercises with step-by-step explanations and no less than 700 video lessons. “Children are more at home in the digital environment than adults, and get to grips with online tools more quickly and easily,” said Nenad Radoičić from SuperSchool.

This is another way in which RNIDS promotes small business-owners from Serbia who are successful in their businesses but also successful in terms of their online presence – those who have capitalised on the fact that websites targeting the local, Serbian market are given priority by the search engines when they are on the national .RS and .СРБ domains. Some of these experiences are already accessible in the form of video testimonials and mini-interviews on the website naravno.rs. Video recordings of the entire DIDS 2017 event will be made available at dids.rs.

Around 600 visitors have registered for DIDS 2017, the eighth annual conference on the development of the Internet globally and on the .RS and .СРБ domains in Serbia. Serbian Internet Domain Day this year will be held 7^th and 8^th March, under the slogan “The Secrets of Internet Search: Search, Find, Visit”. The second day will host the now-traditional Regional Internet Forum – RIF 2017.

Anyone not able attend in person will be able to follow the DIDS programme online, first and foremost at dids.rs and дидс.срб, but also via the RNIDS site and Facebook page, as well as on several other sites belonging to our media sponsors: RTS, Politika, B92, Blic, Južne Vesti, LajvTV, Netokracija, ITdogađaji and Tajmlajn.

Online streaming of DIDS begins on 7^th March at 10 am and will last until 3:30 pm. Questions can be put to speakers via Twitter, using the #dids2017 hashtag.

LINKS TO ONLINE STREAMS 7^TH MARCH:

• dids.rs
• rnids.rs/lat/video-striming
• facebook.com/rnids.rs
• rts.rs/page/tv/ci/live.html
• politika.rs/scc/rubrika/33/Spektar
• b92.net/tehnopolis/dids
• blic.rs/it/pratite-uzivo-konferenciju-dids-2017/n7q6rjv
• netokracija.rs/dids-stream-2017-128681
• juznevesti.com/DIDS-2017-Uzivo.sr.html
• itdogadjaji.com/2017/02/14/tajne-internet-pretraga-i-gugla-na-dids-2017
• tajmlajn.rs/dids-2017-livestream
• livetv.rs/live

This year’s DIDS 2017, organised by RNIDS on 7^th March at the Metropol Palace Hotel in Belgrade, will try to shed light on the machinery we know as the Internet search engine, which many equate with Google.

The second block, of this, the largest free-entry Internet conference in this country, titled Find me Easy, brings together local and regional experts in Google advertising, content creation and results analysis using Google’s tools.

The introductory talk will be by Lazar Džamić, who until recently was head of Google’s ZOO team for brand strategy in London. His talk, titled “How to get found in a world in which you are easily ignored”, will address the different aspects of how the “search machine” should be fed with content.

Following on is a panel discussion on the “search machine” – omnipresent, involved in every aspect of our lives, it is by no means a stranger to us. But what we are interested in is how that machine functions and how it affects our stories and our lives. If the “machine” is not a stranger to us (if we take the right attitude towards it) then how can we affect the way it works and how can we interpret the information we get from it? How can we talk to the machine in a human way, whilst talking to other humans too?

The panel moderator will be Ivan Rečević, consultant and Google Partners trainer at Gaia Consulting, guest from Croatia Miroslav Varga, Google AdWords campaign expert at the company Escape, Jelena Radovanović, Internet entrepreneur and web content creator, cofounder of the wwwrite.rs project, and Radomir Basta, director and lead SEO strategist at Four Dots.

Registration for the Conference is closed and the program will be live streamed on dids.rs, rnids.rs, facebook.com/rnids.rs and more than 10 internet locations of DIDS 2017 media sponsors.

The eighth conference on the Internet in Serbia – DIDS 2017 – will be held on 7^th and 8^th March at the Metropol Palace Hotel in Belgrade, organised by RNIDS. The motto of this year’s DIDS, Internet Search Secrets: Search, Find, Visit, also describes the three themed blocks and overall topic of the event: the Internet search machinery personified in Google.

Thus the first DIDS block is titled From Google’s Angle, with opening speaker Gary Illyes, webmaster trends analyst with Google Inc. His mission is to help website owners create successful sites and provide users with the highest quality search experience. Gary is always on the lookout for ways to improve web search; he represents Google in the global online marketing community, regularly writes for the Google Webmaster Central blog, and also helps users in the Google Webmaster Forums resolve problems with their web sites.

The title of Gary’s talk is Google and internationalisation, in which he gives a deeper look into Google’s internationalisation and geotargetting algorithms, what effects they have on users and how we can influence them. Visitors to DIDS will have a chance to learn first-hand how to use Google’s tools in creating an Internet strategy, and to put questions directly to someone who is at the very source of information about Google.

DIDS, as previously, will be free to all participants, subject to registration, which is necessary due to the limited number of places. Registration of participants is available on the site dids.rs. Those wishing to attend the 3^rd Regional Internet Forum – RIF 2017, to be held on the second day of DIDS, should register at rif.rs.

The largest free-of-charge Internet conference in Serbia, DIDS 2017, will be held on 7^th and 8^th March at the Metropol Palace Hotel, organised now for the eighth time by the Serbian National Internet Domain Registry Foundation (RNIDS), which administers the .RS and .СРБ domain spaces in Serbia.

This year’s Serbian Internet Domain Day will be dedicated to the machinery we know as the Internet search engine, which many equate with Google, and whose secrets this industry gathering will try to shed light on. The motto of this year’s DIDS – Internet Search Secrets: Search, Find, Visit“ – also sets the scene for the three themed blocks planned for the first day of the conference, while the second day will host the now-traditional Regional Internet Forum.

The first DIDS block is titled From Google’s Angle, with opening speaker Gary Illyes, webmaster trends analyst with Google Inc. He is dedicated to creating a better search experience for users by helping webmasters create great websites. He writes for the Google Webmaster Central Blog and also helps users in the Google Webmaster Forums understand changes relating to the Google search algorithm and resolve problems with their web sites.

The second block, titled Find me Easy brings together local and regional experts in Google advertising, content creation and results analysis using Google’s tools. The introductory talk will be by Lazar Džamić, who until recently was head of Google’s ZOO team for brand strategy in London. His talk, titled “How to get found in a world in which you are easily ignored”, will address the different aspects of how the “search machine” should be fed with content. A panel debate will then follow – about this machine and about how to draw in site visitors. The moderator will be Ivan Rečević, consultant and Google Partners trainer at Gaia Consulting, guest from Croatia Miroslav Varga, Google AdWords campaign expert at the company Escape, Jelena Radovanović, Internet entrepreneur and web content creator, cofounder of the wwwrite.rs project, and Radomir Basta, director and lead SEO strategist at Four Dots.

In the third block, titled Good examples of Internet presence, there will be presentations of successful sites, portals and online projects on the national .RS and .СРБ domains. The moderator will be Radomir Lale Marković, cofounder and director of TAG Media. Special mention in this block will be given to the sites selected by RNIDS as the winners of its recent competition.

The second day will play host to the third RIF conference – RIF 2017, the Regional Internet Forum – which brings together delegates of the national Internet registries in south-eastern Europe as well as representatives of state bodies, local Internet communities and global Internet organisations. The topics of the meeting will be content marketing for the national Internet registries, their role and their relationship with the state, information security and exchange of good practices in the region.

DIDS, as previously, will be free to all visitors, subject to registration, which is necessary due to the limited number of places. Registration of visitors begins at the end of February on the site set up at dids.rs, and rif.rs.

The eighth annual conference on the development of the Internet worldwide and on the .RS and .СРБ domains in Serbia – DIDS 2017, will be held on 7th and 8th March at the Metropol Palace hotel in Belgrade, organised by the Serbian National Internet Domain Registry Foundation (RNIDS).

The theme of this year’s Serbian Internet Domain Day, can briefly be described by the slogan: “Internet Search Secrets: Search, Find, Visit”. Google is the main topic of the program during the first day of the conference –visitors will have a chance to learn more about how it works, how to use its tools for creating internet strategy, how to advertise on Google and how to create content that both search engines and visitors will love and finally, how to analyse the results they have achieved.

The second day will host the Regional Internet Forum (RIF 2017), which will bring together representatives of the national registries from neighbouring countries along with organisations involved in domain related issues (state institutions, telecommunications regulatory authorities, CERTs and other internet security-related organisations, registrars, local Internet community representatives), and will cover topics of significance to internet domain registries.

This year too, DIDS is free of charge to all visitors, with mandatory registration due to the limited number of seats. Registration for visitors will be opened by the end of the February on the dids.rs website.

RIF 2016 was a programme accompanying the 7^th annual conference on the development of the Internet globally and on the .RS and .СРБ domains in Serbia – DIDS 2016 – organised by the Serbian National Internet Domain Registry (RNIDS) Foundation. This second Regional Internet forum, held 16^th March at the Hyatt Regency Belgrade hotel, was attended by some fifty representatives of national Internet registries from south-eastern Europe, representatives of state bodies, local Internet communities and global Internet organisations and legal experts from the region. The topics of discussion at RIF 2016 included opinions and examples from the practice of professionals in the region in regard to the multistakeholder model of Internet governance, the development of e-government in Serbia and the region, net neutrality and legal regulation in this area, as well as online security.

In the first block of talks titled “What’s cooking in the region?”, discussion centred around the practical administration of the Internet, as well as successful business models in the domain business in the region. Gabriella Schittek, GSE Manager for Central & Eastern Europe at ICANN, explained that the multistakeholder model, the basis on which her organisation also operated, was a way for all interested parties, organisations and companies to get involved in the process of Internet governance. In July the US government was expected to relinquish supervision of the IANA functions, she said, and then they would have greater responsibility in ensuring the proper operation of the network. She also invited interested students to apply for the NextGen@ICANN programme, which supports successful applicants as the Internet users of the future. Applications will be open until 18^th April.

Iliya Bazlyankov, Chair of the Executive committee at CORE – the Swiss Internet Council of Registrars – talked about the practical side of running the Internet and underlined the need to broaden knowledge in this area, especially in our region. He said that partnership would be stepped up with organisations involved in Internet governance, such as the DiploFoundation in Serbia.

After these introductory talks the delegates at RIF had a chance to hear about progress in the development of e-government in Serbia and Croatia from Marija Kujačić, head of the Department for Implementation and Support in the Directorate for e-Government within the Serbian Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government and Tomislav Vračić, Head of Sector for ICT Infrastructure at the Croatian Ministry of Public Administration. Marija Kujačić presented the benefits of Open Data in government. These are public, digital data that are freely available on the Internet and which can be processed and analysed in this form, the advantages of which are transparency, added value and the potential for new jobs to be created. Arguments for the rejection of this concept are still common in our society, ranging from claims that the quality of Serbian public data is very poor to the opinion that Open Data deprives the government of revenue. Despite this, and the lack of professional analysts, this country was gradually moving towards opening data up to the public, Marija Kujačić concluded. Her colleague and fellow advocate of Open Data, Tomislav Vračić, presented the Croatian e-Građani (e-Citizens) service, which in the two years or less in which it has been up and running, has reached a figure of 13,000 daily logins. Four years ago, when development of this project began, anyone with bureaucratic business to get done could expect to spend a great deal of time standing in long queues. However, since 2014, Croatia’s citizens have been able to register and receive a username and electronic key, and then use the online e-Građani service to file tax returns, register births and get information on benefit payments for new mothers, doctor’s appointments or the expiry of personal documents. Electronic school records even allow parents to check the grades and absences of their children in around 450 schools. Tomislav joked that it was no longer the parents that were nervous before parents’ evenings – now it was the children’s turn to worry, since their grades and absences could easily be monitored with a few clicks.

Davor Šoštarič, Director of the Institute of Information Science (IZUM) in Maribor, Slovenia, was the author of the first shared cataloguing programmes and head of the team for systems analysis and programming of the bibliographic applications from which COBISS – Co-operative Online Bibliographic System and Services – came about. This was the model for a system that became the platform for national bibliographic information systems in Slovenia and another six countries of south-eastern Europe. For this system to function, libraries need to be ready to exchange data, and while they conduct the necessary data entry the system is continuing to develop rapidly. Now, anyone can use an Android or iOS mobile app to check which library has a particular book and whether it is available, as well as a great deal of other useful information.

The second panel debate in this block was opened by Domen Savič, an Internet activist from Slovenia who is an advocate for free Internet, effective mass media and other open communication channels. Before activists got interested in net neutrality this topic did not have a high profile, Savič says, since the public was not aware of this issue and so did not put pressure on governments. As a result, governments also did not feel the need to inform the media in regard to neutrality, and because of the lack of interest in this subject on the part of the media it did not reach a wider audience. This “vicious circle” of apathy was broken by activists. Savič explained how the battle for net neutrality played out in Slovenia, beginning with raising public awareness of the importance of this topic and continuing on to discussions with politicians on the influence of telecommunications companies and the online business sector in general. The next phase involved clear and purposeful calls to action. Here the battle focused on active pressure on members of the national government and on Slovene members of the European Parliament. Events took a similar course across the continent, and last year the European Parliament finally voted to put an end to mobile roaming fees and to establish the principle of net neutrality in the whole of the EU, thus thwarting the telecoms companies that wanted to continue blocking or throttling certain content. Savič ended his talk with the message that regulatory bodies perhaps could not always be objective but could at least try not to work in the favor of industry to the detriment of ordinary citizens. Industry would always have other ways of surviving and ensuring profits, while the same was by no means certain where the public were concerned.

Nataša Đukanović, Director of Marketing at the .ME registry, told of the new ways Montenegro had devised to sell domains: public auctions from which it had earned 2.7 million dollars and the Premium Program, which couples domain sales with support for quality Internet projects and from which it has taken 1,800,000 dollars. The first domain actions were held in 2008 in New York, when the domain date.me was sold for 70,000 dollars. Montenegro is somewhat unusual in that only 0.97% of its domains are registered by locals, while most of its customers are from the US and China. Of course, this is largely due to the potential of the “.me” extension for creating English language phrases from the domain name.

The Macedonian experience in establishing the .МКД domain was shared by Sanja Simonova from MARnet, who told the story of how this country succeeded in registering its Cyrillic TLD after a public debate and voting. Daniel Kalchev from Digital Systems, who founded the Bulgarian ccTLKD registry in 1991, explained that Bulgaria had gone through a much longer procedure in registering its domain. For years industry professionals in Bulgaria pressurised first their own government to get more actively involved in the struggle for the .БГ domain, and then ICANN, which at the time declined to allow Bulgaria this domain, with little by way of explanation. It was only two years ago that Bulgaria finally acquired the right to this domain, but on condition that it establish two registries, one which would control the Cyrillic domain and one for the Latin domain.

In block two, titled “Lawyers’ session” there was discussion of regulations, academic opinion, best practices and regional legal challenges relating to the Internet. David Taylor, a partner in the company Hogan Lovells, which employs 2,500 legal experts and lawyers, explained how a dilemma from the real world spilt over into the virtual world in a case in the wine industry. It had been clear to many for some time, David explained, that an industry producing 38.4 billion bottles annually would want its own top-level domain. After a debate on what the extension ought to be, Donuts Inc launched both the .WINE and the .VIN gTLDs – which turned out a good business move since the sunrise period for these domains was one of the most successful in its history.

Georgi Dimitrov, manager and partner at the Dimitrov, Petrov & Co. law firm, shared examples with attendees at the Hyatt from the practice of Bulgarian courts, notable amongst which was the decision to recognise electronic documents on an equal footing with paper documents, meaning that emails would be treated as valid documents, which would come into force at the moment in which the message arrived in the recipient’s inbox and not the moment at which it was read.

Maja Bogataj Jančič from the Slovenian Intellectual Property Institute shared her thoughts on the EU reforms of this legal area, especially in the context of the development of the Internet, which was its greatest challenge. In order to modernise the legislative framework for this sector, which dated from a time when broadband Internet was not widespread, the European Commission has set reform of copyright laws as one of its priorities. German Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda was given the task of writing a copyright evaluation report which led to a turbulent debate in the European Parliament and more than 550 amendments in just a month and a half. The report sets out the requirement for copyright laws to be worked on, for European regulations to be harmonised across all states and for the interests of all stakeholders to be balanced. However it also contains some provisions that were the subject of much discussion, such as the demand for public domain material to remain the property of all.

Dušan Popović, assistant professor at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law for the subjects Intellectual Property Law and Competition Law weighed in on the discussion on reforms of copyright law in the EU. On the question of whether the EU should introduce the right of publishers to royalties for the use of excerpts from news articles, his talk suggested that it should not – such use did not involve use of the entire work, nor was it “stealing” readers.

Neda Zdraveva from the Iustinianus Primus Faculty of Law at the Saints Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, said that national governments needed to work together in improving consumer protection, while Albina Dlačić, attorney from the Croatian Dlačić practice, explained in what cases Internet providers were liable when they were the sole access provider, and in which cases in Europe the courts had “turned a blind eye” in regard to provision of services to those violating copyright laws, whether it be Pirate Bay or YouTube.

The last block of talks concerned issues of security, with examples of how children and adults could be protected from online fraud, as well as ways of raising awareness of cyber-security, shared by Gorazd Božič, Director of the Slovene SI-CERT team for the prevention of security risks in ICT systems. In addition to Božić, Domen Savič also took part in this discussion, presenting the Cryptoparty in Slovenia, which was dedicated to raising awareness of the importance of privacy in communications, especially in a time when we could expect the rapid development of technologies (such as the Internet of Things) that would bring new dangers.

At the end of this fruitful working day, two events relevant to the industry were announced – SEEDIG (the South Eastern European Dialogue on Internet Governance), to be held in Belgrade in April, and EuroDIG (the European dialogue on Internet Governance) in Brussels on 9^th and 10^th June 2016.

This year sees the seventh Internet conference, DIDS 2016, held 15^th and 16^th March, at the Hyatt Regency Belgrade hotel, under the slogan Living the Internet  Globally – Securely – Locally, organised by the Serbian National Internet Domain Registry Foundation (RNIDS).

The first block of the DIDS 2016 Internet conference will, as tradition dictates, be dedicated to current events in the Internet industry at the global level, trying to answer questions relating to the running of the global Internet – “who, what, when, where and why”. “High politics” directly impacts trends and precedents in the way we live and work on the Internet globally: from the nature of global regulation, to the rights and obligations of companies, to acceptable practices of security services in regard to surveillance – and the rights (and obligations) of users. Do we, as ordinary users, even have any influence on the creation of the policies that decide on the future of the Internet, and what are the global, regional and national mechanisms of our influence? 

DIDS 2016 will be opened by Gabriella Schittek, ICANN Global Stakeholder Engagement Manager CEE; ICANN as an organisation is supporting this year’s event, too. Danko Jevtović, the Director, and Vojislav Rodić, Chair of the RNIDS Board of Governors, will be giving words of introduction on behalf of the host.

A panel debate, moderated by Vladimir Radunović, will be joined by the international guests of the DIDS conference: Marília Maciel from Brazil, coordinator of the Center for Technology and Society at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, Mike Silber from South Africa, member of the ICANN Board and Head Legal and Commercial at Liquid Telecom and Wolf Ludwig from Switzerland, Chair of the European Regional At-Large Organization (EURALO) within ICANN and Program Coordinator of the European Dialogue on Internet Governance (EuroDIG).

DIDS, as previously, will be free to all participants, subject to registration, which is necessary due to the limited number of places. Registration of participants begins at the end of February on the site set up at dids.rs.