Invasion of Ukraine: why Russia should not be kicked out of the internet

Block Russia, Putin. Kick her out of cyberspace. Make it disappear from the Net, where the fights also exist, less destructive in life, certainly, but no less intense, or unbalanced.

Since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, last February 24, a wind has been blowing, anger motivated by emotion and a feeling of injustice, of powerlessness. What to do ? How to counter-attack without going into open war, without fueling the fear of a world conflict, even thermonuclear, as we said in the days of the not so cold war?

A desperate call

On February 28, when Russia had been conducting its military invasion of Ukraine for four days, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister, sent a letter to Göran Marby, CEO of ICANN. This called on the leader of the private American non-profit company, which oversees the allocation of domain names, to take urgent and extreme measures.

Measures aimed at erasing Russia from the Internet, in particular by revoking “permanent or temporary” of certain national top-level domains (CCTLD), such as .ru and .su, by also revoking SSL certificates, and also by closing the root DNS server located in Russia.

Mykhailo Fedorov also explained in this letter that he had asked the RIPE NCC, the regional register of IP addresses (which covers Europe and part of Asia), to withdraw all the IP addresses allocated to the Russian local registers.

A double appeal which speaks volumes about Ukraine’s despair and which was heard, but fortunately was not followed up. Horrible as it sounds, the apparent inaction is the only decision that needed to be made. Otherwise there was too much to lose.

A clear position, necessarily inflexible

the RIPE NCC was the first to give its answer. On February 28, its executive council declared that “the means of communication must not be affected by domestic political disputes, international conflicts or war”. “It is crucial that the RIPE NCC remains neutral and does not take a position. »we also read.

Icann’s response was issued a few days later, on March 3, and unsurprisingly goes in the same direction. In particular, it indicates that “our mission is not to take punitive action, establish sanctions, or restrict access to parts of the Internet – no matter how provocative”. Göran Marby also writes: “ICANN was designed to make sure the internet works, its coordinating role should not be used to stop it working”.

Behind these administrative positions hide two essential aspects that underlie the Net, its balance. Schematically, it is a technical component and an “ethical” component.

“As you know, the Internet is a decentralized system. No actor has the ability to control it or shut it down”writes the boss of Icann in his response.

A Broken Internet

From a technical point of view, giving a favorable response to these requests would be “enough to break everything”explains Pierre Bonis, CEO of Afnic (the association in charge of managing French domain names – .fr, .re, .yt, etc.), who agreed to speak with us by telephone. .

Technically, it would be very complicated, not to say impossible, but by lending itself to the game of “what if?” “, and by telling ourselves that Russia would not react, we would end up with “the entire Russian zone is unpublished, until the deletion is duplicated on all DNS servers”. From this moment on, all Russian Internet servers would become inaccessible. And if IP addresses were removed, even personal computers would be unable to connect to the Net. Ukraine would then have its revenge? Maybe, but at what cost!

Because the Net is made of deep intricacies. This disappearance would have a huge technical impact. “The Net is not just the Web”recalls Pierre Bonis. “Thousands of servers would disappear, which serve scripts, data, advertisements, for example, and would be untraceable”. And on the Russian side, to take just one silly example, all the machines running Windows and sending their requests to Microsoft’s servers, for updates in particular, would be unable to connect.

According to Pierre Bonis, this technical and moral break “would precipitate the fragmentation of the Net”. It would be giving the world’s dictators and autocrats the opportunity they’ve been waiting for to not only fragment the Net, but simply destroy it by withdrawing from it. Even if the CEO of Afnic specifies that the “on/off” fantasy, of the immediate switch away from the Net, cherished by certain more or less totalitarian regimes, is totally unrealistic.

A good argument to confirm that this risk of a split is real is none other than the RUnet, as the Russian Net attempt is called, which the Kremlin has been touting so much since its first tests in 2019. A network hijacked from the Net, which would be far from the ideal solution.

“The Russians could perhaps establish an independent national network”explains Pierre Bonis, “but at best, it would be like a giant intranet”.

Gold “The Internet is no longer useless if it’s just intranets that are juxtaposed”puts the head of Afnic into perspective, before recalling that “the Net is made of interdependence, in particular because of the specialties of each country”.

Ultimately, technically, it is not Russia that would be deprived of the Internet, it is the Internet that would be broken, in its structure, but also in the ideal that ensures its cohesion.

A higher interest? A Superior Internet

We tend to forget that “The Internet is something unique in world history, which is almost a miracle”underlines Pierre Bonis rightly. “There is a trust in the infrastructure of the Net that has never been shaken”.

Despite the political and economic stakes, despite the control that the United States has long ensured and assumed, before ceding more control, the actors of the Net have always resisted the pressure. “Even when the United States supervised the root of the Net, it was not used as a political weapon”gives the example of Pierre Bonis.

From Icann to the universities scattered around the world that manage the root servers, via Afnic or even the RIPE NCC, these bodies have always placed the interests of the common heritage that is the Net above the fray.

Of course we have seen, over the years, ISPs block sites, tech giants delete web pages, remove applications, or even hosts see a domain name seized by the courts. Corn, “at the protocol level, at the level of the technical core that underpins the Net, there has been no alteration to satisfy a pressure”explains Pierre Bonis, before specifying that this vision is in no way a value judgment of the Ukrainian demand.

Since the origins of the Net, Icann, Iana, some NGOs, or even universities carry out their mission which is “to guarantee the nominal functioning of the infrastructures” not only for technical reasons, but also to maintain what the Net is and symbolizes.

To deviate from this rule, even for the best of reasons, is to create a precedent, it is to pervert the tool that is the Internet, it is to show that it is possible to come to terms with a fundamental principle, that of a neutrality which must be absolute. A kind of super “net neutrality” in a way, Pierre Bonis amuses himself by twisting the arm of this formula a little.

From the moment the Net would serve one camp more than another, even for good reasons, it would cease to be everyone’s heritage. Therefore, it could be exposed to all manipulations.

If Icann and the RIPE NCC had responded favorably to Ukraine’s requests, this would have led, “legally, to a medium-term weakening of the Net and its players, who would be transformed into operators”.

Icann’s decision therefore avoided another tragedy: “the beginning of the end of the internet”. As Pierre Bonis wrote on Twitter a few hours before our interview: “Faced with violence and arbitrariness, the balance of power can be an answer, not anomie. »

To touch this miraculous balance would be to venture on “a slippery and dangerous slope, which would destroy the Internet, which remains the best way to circulate ideas, goods and information”. It would destroy the best weapon to fight against autocrats of all kinds.