The Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation can claim several achievements since the beginning of the Russian invasion: thanks to the wave of solidarity with its cause that has been unleashed throughout the West, its incumbent Mykhailo Fedorov, armed only with his Twitter account It has achieved things like Google agreeing to censor Russian public media on YouTube and the Play Store, or Elon Musk deciding to activate the satellite Internet of his Starlink service.
Now, Fedorov has wanted to go one step further, and has asked (this time via email, not Twitter) ICANN to take a series of measures aimed, fundamentally, at disconnecting Russia from the global Internet. Bill Woodcock, CEO of PCH (the international organization responsible for providing operational support and security for critical Internet infrastructure), explained in a Twitter thread what they are and why they seem like a terrible idea.
Giving Putin the reason in his policy of ‘digital cyberseparatism’
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is the international non-profit entity responsible for managing the allocation of domain nameshas received from the Ukrainian government three requests very specific from the Ukrainian authorities:
Remove the TLDs or domain extensions assigned to Russia from the root zone of the nameservers. For practical purposes, this would Russian web and mail servers linked to .ru, .??, .??? domains and .su will no longer be available outside the Russian Federation (and even, depending on the settings, also for users of some Russian operators).
Regardless of what ICANN decides, domain operator and hosting provider Namecheap has already warned its Russian users to find another company to register their domains.
Disconnect DNS servers within Russia, also dependent on ICANN, which would extraordinarily complicate connectivity within Russia itself. Although, since the government and military systems have safeguards for cases like this, it would only affect ordinary citizens.
Revoke IP address delegations to Russian networksthus breaking the RPSL and RPKI security that protects your routing, making it easy for users (again, not those operating within government networks) to be exposed to man-in-the-middle or MITM attacks, which could reveal their passwords and banking credentials.
None of this would have any significant impact on the Russian government or military, which has already prepared for such a situation for a massive drill carried out last July.
In the short term, Ukraine’s plan would have the sole effect of making life difficult for Russian citizens, in addition to leaving them disconnected from the news and from their contacts abroad. “That’s not a great way to diminish Russian public support for the war,” says Woodcock.
“Long-term, this would set the precedent that small industry associations based in Los Angeles and Amsterdam would begin to act as arbitrators in international conflicts and play with the Internet domains assigned to supposedly sovereign countries”.
“And if that were to happen, many more countries besides China and Russia would break away from the common consensus Internet that allows us all to talk to each other. China already took this step in 2003, building the Great Firewall.”[…]”.
Russia already launched in 2019, as we said before, to create its own ‘Runet’, an autonomous ‘national Internet’, and a movement of this kind by an international authority such as ICANN it would only reinforce their claims to implement a policy of digital sovereignty.