Re: Dropping support for the .ru top level domain

[Mel Beckman <mel () beckman org>]

It amazes me that these knee-jerk sanction reactions go so far down the regulatory rabbit hole before they are rejected 
by knowledgeable people. The idea that blocking the .ru domain would punish only the Russian government is as laughable 
as thinking that blocking the .tv domain would punish the constitutional monarchy of Tuvalu.

-mel via cell

On Mar 14, 2022, at 11:59 AM, jim deleskie <deleskie () gmail com> wrote:


Terrible idea on so many levels.

-jim

On Mon, Mar 14, 2022, 12:30 PM Patrick Bryant <patrick () pbryant com<mailto:patrick () pbryant com>> wrote:
I don't like the idea of disrupting any Internet service. But the current situation is unprecedented.

The Achilles Heel of general public use of Internet services has always been the functionality of DNS.

Unlike Layer 3 disruptions, dropping or disrupting support for the .ru TLD can be accomplished without disrupting the 
Russian population's ability to access information and services in the West.

The only countermeasure would be the distribution of Russian national DNS zones to a multiplicity of individual DNS 
resolvers within Russia. Russian operators are in fact implementing this countermeasure, but it is a slow and arduous 
process, and it will entail many of the operational difficulties that existed with distributing Host files, which DNS 
was implemented to overcome.

The .ru TLD could be globally disrupted by dropping the .ru zone from the 13 DNS root servers. This would be the most 
effective action, but would require an authoritative consensus. One level down in DNS delegation are the 5 
authoritative servers. I will leave it to the imagination of others to envision what action that could be taken there...

ru      nameserver = a.dns.ripn.net<http://a.dns.ripn.net>
ru      nameserver = b.dns.ripn.net<http://b.dns.ripn.net>
ru      nameserver = d.dns.ripn.net<http://d.dns.ripn.net>
ru      nameserver = e.dns.ripn.net<http://e.dns.ripn.net>
ru      nameserver = f.dns.ripn.net<http://f.dns.ripn.net>

The impact of any action would take time (days) to propagate.