As the Russian Federation continues to invade Ukraine, a representative from the country has asked American and European organizations to help impose sanctions on Russia’s internet access.
These sanctions include revoking domains issued to the Russian Federation, revoking certificates for a protocol that establishes secure links between networked computers for those domains and shutting down servers in St. Petersburg and Moscow.
In a letter sent Monday, Ukraine’s Andrii Nabok asked the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to help impose the sanctions. ICANN is an American not-for-profit partnership established in 1998 to keep “the Internet secure, stable and interoperable,” according to its website.
Nabok is Ukraine’s representative on ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee.
A function of ICANN is to coordinate the Internet naming system, allowing computers to find each other based on domain names and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.
“ICANN doesn’t control content on the Internet,” said the organization. “It cannot stop spam and it doesn’t deal with access to the Internet. But through its coordination role of the Internet’s naming system, it does have an important impact on the expansion and evolution of the Internet.”
Nabok argued in his letter to ICANN that, in its invasion of Ukraine, Russia “breached numerous clauses of International Law,” including Article 2.4 of the UN Charter, and has targeted civilian infrastructure such as residential apartments, kindergartens, hospitals etc., in violation of Article 51(3) of Additional Protocol I and Article 13(3) of Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions.
He also said Russia’s actions have been made possible “mainly due to the Russian propaganda machinery using websites continuously spreading disinformation, hate speech, promoting violence and hiding the truth regarding the war in Ukraine,” and that Ukrainian IT infrastructure has been hit with Russian cyberattacks. Nabok said Russian aggression could spread.
Specific sanctions he suggested regarding the Russian Federation were: to revoke, permanently or temporarily, the Russian domains “.ru”, “.рф” and “.su” and possibly others issued to the Russian Federation; contribute to the revoking for SSL certificates for the abovementioned domains; and to shut down DNS root servers in St. Petersburg and Moscow.
Additionally, Nabok said he planned to send a separate request to RIPE NCC – the Regional Internet Registry for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia – to impose similar sanctions.
“All of these measures will help users seek for reliable information in alternative domain zones, preventing propaganda and disinformation,” Nabok said.
According to CNN Business, Internet governance experts say Ukraine’s request would effectively sever Russia from the internet if carried out.
“Email addresses would stop working and internet users wouldn’t be able to log on. Russia would suddenly find itself on a digital island,” said the outlet. It would also cut off Russian citizens, some who have protested against the attack on Ukraine, from accessing outside information.
Runa Sandvik, a digital security researcher, said in a tweet that cutting off internet access to Russia could be a violation of International Law, as the United Nations considers the Internet a human right.
“It is the first time in my memory that a government has asked ICANN to interfere with the normal operation,” of the domain name system at such a scale, Internet expert Vint Cerf told CNN Business.
Furthermore, Mallory Knodel – chief technology officer at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a US-based think tank – said the measures would not impact “the really powerful systemic institutions like the military and the government.”
She also said that the actions could break down “really critical authentication and web security functions,” that protect Russians, including dissidents.
Actions requested by Nabok would impair Russian Internet users’ ability to connect with IP addresses from other places, CNN Business explained. While it is possible that “Russia may have enough of its own, local version of the internet replicated so that Russian internet users could connect among themselves for a time,” it would not be the full version of the internet.
However, experts believe it is unlikely that the request will be fulfilled. They said it is unclear if ICANN could decide to cut off Russia from the internet and that it could set a dangerous precedent allowing authoritarian countries to make similar demands.
Russia and China have already worked to build their own versions of the internet and Kondel said cutting citizens off from the wider web might be what Russia wants.
“Russia’s been trying for a long time to figure out how to disconnect from the larger internet, and one of the main things standing in its way from doing that is the global domain name system,” she said.
