The year when the Serbian .RS domain celebrates its tenth anniversary will also see the ninth time the best-attended annual conference on the Internet – DIDS 2018 – is held in Serbia. The organiser is the Serbian National Internet Domain Registry Foundation (RNIDS) and the event will be held on 6^th and 7^th March at the Metropol Palace Hotel in Belgrade. The slogan of this year’s Serbian Internet Domains Day is “Guardians of Internet Identity”.

The first block of DIDS, titled “Cyber Personality” will address the very current topic – in Europe and worldwide – of the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, which comes into force in the EU in late May and which will impact the way some companies in Serbia do business. Moderator Vladimir Radunović will discuss this regulation and other aspects of online privacy with participants in a panel debate. Thomas Rickert, attorney from Germany and the chair of the Names & Numbers Forum at “eco” – the Association of the Internet Industry – will be giving an introductory talk on this topic. The discussion will be joined by Cormac Callanan, CEO of Aconite Internet Solutions from Ireland, and Nevena Ružić, assistant to the general secretary of the office of the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection.

The second block is titled “Digital Heritage” and will focus on digitalisation in culture and science, with moderator Tamara Vučenović PhD. Before the panel discussion, an introductory talk will be given by Matjaž Filo, manager of the IT sector at the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Social Sciences. Joining the debate will also be Adam Sofronijević PhD, deputy director of the Svetozar Marković University Library in Belgrade, and Nikola Božić, programme director of the Petnica Science Centre.

The third block, titled “Online Business”, will be moderated by Radomir Lale Marković, who will also be the main host of the Conference. To begin this block, Milovan Matijević and Branka Matijević, from the company “Mineco Computers” will present the results of the 2017 Digital Vitality Index of small, micro- and medium enterprises in Serbia study, carried out for the first time in Serbia. After that we will present to you few Serbian companies that have successfully made use of all the benefits of internet technology on the Serbian national domains: vivatravel.rs, garden.rs, archiplay.rs, iskonmode.rs and teglas.rs.

DIDS 2018 will, on 7^th March, also host the Regional TLD Forum, an industry gathering for representatives of national TLD registries from the region.

DIDS, as previously, will be free to all visitors, subject to registration, which is necessary due to the limited number of places. Visitor registrations begin at the end of February, via the website at dids.rs and дидс.срб.