Re: Dropping support for the .ru top level domain

[Brian R <briansupport () hotmail com>]

I can understand governments wanting this to be an option but I would let them do blocking within their countries to 
their own people if that is their desire.  This is another pandoras box.  Its bad enough that some countries control 
this already to block free flow of information.
If global DNS is no longer trusted then many actors will start maintaining their own broken lists (intentionally or 
unintentionally).

  *   This will not stop Russia, they will just run their own state sponsored DNS servers.  We can imagine what else 
might be implemented on that concept...
  *   Countries or users that still want access will do the same with custom DNS servers.
  *   This will take us down another path of no return as a global standard that is not political or politically 
controlled.
  *   The belief that the internet is open and free (as much as possible) will be broken in one more way.
  *   This will also accelerate the advancement of crypto DNS like NameCoin (Years ago I liked the idea but I don't 
know how it is being run anymore.) or UnstoppableDomains for example.   Similar to what is starting to happen to 
central banking as countries start shutting down bank accounts for political reasons.

I am glad to see soo many people on here and many of the organizations running these services state as much.

Brian


________________________________
From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+briansupport=hotmail.com () nanog org> on behalf of Patrick Bryant <patrick () pbryant com>
Sent: Saturday, March 12, 2022 2:47 AM
To: nanog () nanog org <nanog () nanog org>
Subject: Dropping support for the .ru top level domain

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.