Maybe now’s the time for ICANN to start dismantling the Soviet Union

Like I’m sure a great many of you, I spent much of yesterday listening to the news and doom-scrolling social media in despair, anger and helplessness.

War has returned to Europe, with Vladimir Putin’s Russia yesterday invading Ukraine on a flimsy pretext, in an apparent effort to begin to recreate the former Soviet Union.

I watched r/ukraine on Reddit, as its number of subscribers increased by tens of thousands in a matter of hours, with people from all over the world wondering what they could do to help, from volunteering to literally take up arms to hollow if well-meaning virtue-signalling.

Can I volunteer for the Ukrainian army? I live in Japan and can’t speak the language, does that matter?

If any Ukrainians can make it to Ottawa, I have a spare couch for as long as you need it!

Here’s a guide to how I survived the snipers in Sarajevo!

Here’s a yellow-and-blue banner I made that you can use on your Twitter!

Slava Ukraini!

It got me thinking: is there anything the domain industry or ICANN community can do? Is there anything I can do?

The only thing I could think of was to run this idea up the flagpole and see if anyone sets fire to it:

Maybe now’s the time for ICANN to start dismantling the Soviet Union.

It may sound ludicrous. The Soviet Union hasn’t existed outside Putin’s fantasies since 1991.

But it’s alive and well in the DNS, where the top-level domain .su has somehow managed to survive the death of its nation, evade any efforts to have it removed, and stick around in the root for over 30 years.

It currently has over 100,000 registered domains.

I’m not suggesting for a second that all of these domains were registered by people who support the return of the USSR, or are even aware of the connection, but it is the ccTLD of choice for sites like this gung-ho propaganda rag, and the Donetsk People’s Republic, the breakaway Ukrainian region.

Whenever I’ve asked people with better in-depth knowledge of ccTLD policy than me for an explanation of why .su continues to exist, despite not having a nation to represent, I generally get a lot of hand-waving and mumbling about a “lack of political will”.

Maybe there’s a political will now, if not at ICANN Org then perhaps in the ICANN community.

My understanding, based on a deep-dive through the public record, is that it might be possible to have .su deleted — the word ICANN uses is “retired” — but the rules are arguably open to interpretation.

A bit of background first

ICANN’s rules concerning ccTLDs are a bit like the UK constitution — they’re not written down in any one document, but have rather evolved over the years through a combination of habit, convention, case law and pure making-it-up-on-the-spot.

ICANN, and IANA before it, “is not in the business of deciding what is and what is not a country”. It has always deferred to the International Organization for Standardization, which maintains a list of names and corresponding country-codes called ISO 3166-1.

If a country or territory appears on the 3166-1 list, its corresponding “alpha-2” code is eligible to become a ccTLD.

SU was listed on 3166-1, the same as any other country, until September 1992, when it was broken up into 15 names and codes corresponding to the 15 former Soviet nations. Russia got RU and Ukraine got UA, for examples, and their ccTLDs are .ru and .ua.

SU was then given a “transitionally reserved” status by the ISO, which basically means it’s due to be phased off the list altogether (albeit not for 50 years) and organizations are discouraged from using it.

In corresponding ccTLDs, every string on the “transitionally reserved” list has either transitioned to a new ccTLD (such as East Timor’s .tp becoming Timor-Leste’s .tl) or split into a collection of new ccTLDs (such as the break-up of the Netherlands Antilles).

Since ICANN took over the root, these and other transitions typically happen with the consent of the local government and the local registry. But the Soviet Union dissolved long before ICANN existed, it doesn’t have a government, and the registry is in no hurry to give up its asset, which is a bit of a money maker.

ICANN stated its intention to retire .su as early as 2003, and the earliest archived IANA record, from 2006, said it was “being phased out”.

It launched a brief consultation on the retirement of ccTLDs in 2006, which prompted a flood of comments from outraged .su supporters.

The following year, there were face-to-face talks between ICANN and the two Moscow companies running .su at the time — the Foundation for Internet Development (FID) and Russian Institute for Public Networks (RIPN).

IANA’s Kim Davies, who now heads the division as an ICANN VP, blogged in 2007, partly in response to these comments, that .su had a chance to remain delegated:

To retain .SU, under current policy they would need to successfully apply for the code to be re-instated into the ISO 3166-1 standard, either as a regular two-letter country code, or as an “exceptionally reserved” code like UK and EU.

The “exceptionally reserved” list is another subdivision of ISO 3166-1. It currently includes four codes that are also ccTLDs — .ac for Ascension Island, a UK territory, .uk itself, and the European Union’s .eu.

The fourth is .su, because FID somehow managed to persuade the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency to get SU on the list, reversing its 50-year sentence on the transitional list, in 2008. It appears to be the only example of a private, non-governmental, non-UN entity requesting and obtaining a special listing.

There’s been very little public discussion about .su’s fate since then. My suspicion is that it fell off the radar when ICANN CEO Paul Twomey, who made ccTLD relations a cornerstone of his administration, left the Org in 2009.

Or it could be that that the “exceptionally reserved” status was enough to satisfy IANA’s eligibility criteria. But there are several reasons why that might not be the case.

In Davies’ 2007 blog, post he said: “There are other issues that will need to be addressed for .SU to be a viable ccTLD designation, but recognition by the appropriate standard is a prerequisite.”

IANA currently has a web page in which it lays out seven ways a TLD can get into the root. This is what it says about exceptionally reserved strings:

Eligible under ICANN Board Resolution 00.74. This resolution provides for eligibility for domains that are not on the ISO 3166-1 standard, but that the Maintenance Agency deems exceptionally reserved, and requires that the Agency “has issued a reservation of the code that covers any application of ISO 3166-1 that needs a coded representation in the name of the country, territory, or area involved”. There is currently (as of June 2013) only one code eligible under these requirements, “EU” for the European Union.

The cited ICANN board resolution, now incorporated into IANA precedential law, dates from September 2000. It’s the resolution that hacked historical IANA practice in order to set the groundwork for eventually levering .eu into the root.

But the relevant part here is where IANA explicitly rules out any exceptionally reserved string other than EU meeting the requirements to be a ccTLD as of 2013. SU’s ISO 3166-1 status has not changed since 2008.

RIPN and FID explicitly acknowledged this in a joint letter (pdf) to ICANN then-CEO Paul Twomey in 2007. In it, they wrote:

we understand that should ISO-3166/MA add the two letter code “SU” to the exceptionally reserved or indeterminately reserved ISO3166-1 list will not be sufficient to clarify the status of .SU as current ICANN/IANA policies require a venue in which legality of actions can be determined.

To paraphrase: being on the list ain’t no good if you got no country.

They said that if ICANN went ahead and retired .su anyway, they would like 10 to 15 years to transition their registrants to alternative TLDs.

Which handily brings me to now

There has never been a formal community-agreed ICANN policy on retiring ccTLDs, until now.

By happy coincidence, the ccTLD Name Supporting Organization recently finished work on such a policy. It came out of public comment a few weeks ago and will next (I was going to write “soon”, but you know?) come before the ICANN board of directors for consideration.

The proposed policy (pdf) conspicuously avoids mentioning .su by name and seems to go out of its way to kick the can on .su’s potential retirement.

The silence is deafening, and the ambiguity is claustrophobic.

It defines ccTLDs as:

• 2-letter ccTLDs corresponding to an ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 Code Element (the majority of ccTLDs).
• 2-letter Latin ccTLDs not corresponding to an ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 Code Element
• IDN ccTLDs as approved by ICANN

The second bullet point is accompanied by a footnote that explains it’s referring to the “exceptionally reserved” codes UK, AC and EU, three of the four ccTLDs on the ISO’s exceptional list.

The ccTLDs .uk and .ac which refer to exceptionally reserved codes UK and AC are grandfathered as ccTLDs and .eu, which corresponds to the exceptionally reserved code EU, was delegated under the relevant ICANN Board resolution from September 2000

There’s no mention of SU, the fourth.

Under the proposed policy, the ball would start rolling on a possible retirement whenever a “triggering event” happens. The relevant trigger for .su (and .uk, .eu and .ac) is the ISO making a change — seemingly any change — to its 3166-1 listing.

IANA, referred to in the policy as the IANA Functions Operator or IFO, would then have to decide whether the change warranted initiating the retirement process, which would take at least five years.

As is so often the case in ICANN policy-making, the difficult decisions seem to have been punted.

Only one ccTLD operator filed a public comment on this proposed policy — it was RIPN, operator of .su. While generally supportive, it worried aloud that triggering events prior to the approval of the policy should not count. Its triggering events were in 2008 and the 1990s, after all.

The policy’s creators again ambiguously kicked the can:

The [Working Group] believes the applicability of the Policy to existing situations or those emerging before the proposed Policy becomes effective is out of scope of its mandate. For situations prior to this Policy coming into force, responsibility lies with the IFO to create a suitable procedure. The WG suggests that such a procedure could be based on and anticipates the proposed Policy.

So… does ICANN get to apply the policy retroactively or not?

My overall sense is that the .su situation, which the record shows was certainly on the minds of the ccNSO during the early stages of the policy-development process, was considered too difficult to address, so they took the ostrich approach of pretending it doesn’t exist.

The .su registry seems to think it’s safe from enforced retirement, but it doesn’t seem to be absolutely sure.

In conclusion

I think the record shows that .su doesn’t really deserve to exist in the DNS, and that there’s an opportunity to get rid of it. ccTLDs are for countries and territories that exist and the Soviet Union hasn’t existed for three decades.

IANA rules don’t seem to support its existence, and upcoming policy changes seem to give enough wiggle room for the retirement process to be kicked off, if the will is there to do so.

It would take years, sure.

Would it help stop innocent Ukrainians getting gunned down in the street this week? No.

Would it be more than simple virtue signalling? I think so.

And if not, why not just do it anyway?

In a world where an organization like UEFA considers Russia too toxic for poxy football match, what would it say about an organization that allows the actual Soviet Union’s domain to continue to exist online?

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Tagged: .ru, .su, ccnso, fid, iana, ICANN, iso, iso 3166-1, ripn