Re: Dropping support for the .ru top level domain

[Mel Beckman <mel () beckman org>]

Owen is spot on, and for people who say dropping .ru you won’t affect citizens, they are forgetting about email 
addresses. I have a friend at a .ru domain who hosts his email out of country, which leaves me with a reliable way to 
give him real news.

 -mel

On Mar 15, 2022, at 12:08 PM, Owen DeLong via NANOG <nanog () nanog org> wrote:

 I’m reminded of a quote from “2010 The year we make contact”:
“Just because our governments are behaving like asses doesn’t mean we have to.” (Roy Scheider as Dr. Heywood Floyd)

Breaking any communications facility is, IMHO, counterproductive to all sides. Communication is almost always the key 
to ending conflict.
In this case, it might require more than just communications, but breaking the .RU domain almost certainly isn’t going 
to help resolve the situation.

The internet should, ideally, continue to treat governments behaving like asses as damage and route around them.

Owen

On Mar 15, 2022, at 02:07 , Patrick Bryant <patrick () pbryant com<mailto:patrick () pbryant com>> wrote:

I propose dropping support of the .ru domains as an alternative to the other measures discussed here, such as dropping 
Russian ASNs -- which would have the counterproductive effect of isolating the Russian public from western news 
sources. Blocking those ASNs would also be futile as a network defense, if not implemented universally, since the bad 
actors in Russia usually exploit proxies in other countries as pivot points for their attacks.

Preventing the resolution of the .ru TLD would not impact the Russian public's ability to resolve and access all other 
TLDs. As I noted, there are countermeasures, including Russia standing up its own root servers, but there are two 
challenges to countermeasure: 1) it would require modifying evey hints file on every resolver within Russia and, 2) 
"other measures" could be taken against whatever servers Russia implemented as substitutes. Dropping support for the 
.ru TLD action may incentivize the Russian State to bifurcate its national network, making it another North Korea, but 
that action is already underway.

Other arguments are political, and I do not presume to set international political policy. I only offer a technical 
opinion, not a political one. The legalistic arguments of maintaining treaties is negated by the current state of war.

On Tue, Mar 15, 2022 at 2:29 AM Fred Baker <fredbaker.ietf () gmail com<mailto:fredbaker.ietf () gmail com>> wrote:
My viewpoint, and the reason I recommended against it, is that it gives Putin something he has wanted for a while, 
which is a Russia in which he is in control of information flows. We do for him what he has wanted for perhaps 20 
years, and come out the bad guys - “the terrible west gut us off!”.  I would rather have people in Russia have 
information flows that have a second viewpoint other than the Kremlin’s. I have no expectation that it will get through 
uncensored, but I would rather it was not in any sense “our fault” and therefore usable by Putin’s propaganda machine.

Sent from my iPad

On Mar 14, 2022, at 2:14 PM, Brian R <briansupport () hotmail com<mailto:briansupport () hotmail com>> wrote:


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<mailto:hotmail.com () nanog org>> on behalf of Patrick 
Bryant <patrick () pbryant com<mailto:patrick () pbryant com>>
Sent: Saturday, March 12, 2022 2:47 AM
To: nanog () nanog org<mailto:nanog () nanog org> <nanog () nanog org<mailto: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.