Re: Ukraine request yikes

[David Conrad <drc () virtualized org>]

On Mar 1, 2022, at 12:16 AM, George Herbert <george.herbert () gmail com> wrote:
> Ukraine (I think I read as) want ICANN to turn root nameservers off, revoke address delegations, and turn off TLDs 
> for Russia.

More or less.  The Government Advisory Committee member from Ukraine has asked ICANN to:
- Revoke .RU, .рф, and .SU (all Russian-managed ccTLDs)

As the GAC member undoubtedly knows, that’s not how ICANN works. Barring a court/executive order in ICANN’s 
jurisdiction (and even then, it gets a bit sticky see 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/11/13/dc-court-rules-that-top-level-domain-not-subject-to-seizure/
 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/11/13/dc-court-rules-that-top-level-domain-not-subject-to-seizure/>),
 ICANN essentially treats ccTLDs as national sovereign resources. A third party, no matter how justified, requesting a 
change of this nature will not go anywhere. Simply put, ICANN is NOT a regulator in the forma sense, it is a private 
entity incorporated in California. The powers that it has are the result of mutual contractual obligations and it’s a 
bit unlikely the Russian government has entered into any contracts with ICANN, particularly those that would allow 
ICANN to unilaterally revoke any of the Russian ccTLDs.

- "Contribute to the revoking for SSL certificates for the abovementioned domains.”

I’m not sure what this even means.

- Shutdown the root server instances operated by ICANN that are within Russia

ICANN could conceivably do this unilaterally, but there are a lot more root server instances operated by other RSOs 
(including RIPE NCC, Verisign, ISC, and NASA). Even if all the RSOs shut down their instances, it’d merely increase 
latency for root queries by a small amount unless all DNS traffic to the RSO IPs were blocked at Russian borders.  And 
even then, Russia has been “testing” operating in a disconnected mode, so it’s highly likely there are root server 
equivalents in Russia that would continue to resolve root queries.

However, as mentioned, the UA GAC member probably knows all this and I imagine the intent of this letter was less to 
cause the requested actions to actually occur than it was to raise the profile of the conflict in the Internet 
governance context.

Regards,
-drc

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