RIPN HISTORY

Russian Institute for Public Networks (RIPN) was established by the State Committee of the RSFSR for Science and Higher Education in 1992 and registered as a non-profit organization. The main tasks of the Institute were: to participate directly in the creation of scientific and educational networks in Russia, to elaborate methods and technologies for the development of public computer networks, implementing the possibilities of information exchange for a wide range of consumers and suppliers of information, including, above all, state, educational and scientific organizations.

One of RIPN's first projects was the administration of the .SU domain, which appeared in 1990. Technical base support has been established and domain name registration has been organized. RIPN is still the manager and the registry of the .SU domain.

RIPN's experience in working with TLDs turned out to be in demand in 1994, when Russia's national domain .RU was registered and the question arose as to who should become the administrator of the new domain. The three Russian Internet Service Providers then independently applied to the IANA (Authorised Organization for the Allocation of Addresses) for the right to administer the domain.

On December 4, 1993 at a meeting of the then largest providers - Demos, Glasnet, Techno, Sovam, Relcom, X-Atom, Freenet - an agreement was signed on the administration of the .RU zone, according to which these duties were assigned to RIPN - an independent and non-profit organization. At the same time, an informal association, the .RU Domain Coordination Group, was established to determine the registration policy for domain names in the .RU zone.

The Coordination Group was subsequently transformed into the National Internet Domain Coordination Centre, co-founded by RIPN. Until 2001 RIPN had been the only registrar of domain names in the .RU zone. But at the beginning of the XXI century there was a boom of Internet development in Russia and it became evident that the registration of domain names should be decentralized. In this context in April 2000 RIPN established an autonomous non-profit organization called the Regional Network Information Centre (RU-NIC) - subsequently one of Russia's largest registrars, RU-CENTER.

Another major activity of RIPN was the connection of scientific and educational organizations to the global Internet. In 1993 the Institute co-founded the RELARN Association of Scientific and Educational Organizations - Users of Computer Data Transmission Networks and for many years was the organizer of the Association's annual conferences. In 1995 RIPN engineers created Russia's first traffic exchange point between Internet operators, MSK-IX, which later evolved into MCK-IX Computer Network Interconnection Centre.

Since 1996 RIPN has been the operator of the Russian interregional backbone network RBNet, established for the needs of science and education. Dozens of universities and institutes from Kaliningrad to Khabarovsk have been connected to RBNet.

In 2003 RBNet was connected to GEANT, a pan-European research network, giving Russian scientists access to overseas computing resources. And in 2005 RBNet established its own major telecommunications hub in Amsterdam.

Among other projects, RIPN launched one of the first electronic digital signature certification centers with support for GOST certificates, which was put into experimental operation in Russia in 2002. It was also one of the first large-scale implementations of the IPv6 protocol in Russia. In 2003 a joint infrastructure was created for traffic exchange between Moscow and St. Petersburg Internet service providers (MSK-SPB-IX). In 2007 regional traffic exchange points were built jointly with RTComm.

Russian Institute for Public Networks is the organization that pioneered the emergence of the Russian segment of the Internet.

Minutes 1993