As Russia advances on Kyiv, .ua moves out-of-country

Ukraine’s ccTLD registry has moved its servers out of the country to avoid disruption due to the Russian invasion.

Hostmaster said that servers responsible for “the operability of the .ua domain” have been moved to other European countries, seemingly with the assistance of other registry operators.

The company’s technical operations were based in Kyiv, which is currently under threat from advancing Russian troops.

Hostmaster announced the news on Saturday, the third day of the invasion.

A day earlier, it said it had signed up to Cloudflare’s DDoS protection service to protect its two largest zones — .com.ua and .kiev.ua — from distributed denial of service attacks.

It had suffered one such attack earlier this month, before the invasion, with traffic at some points exceeding 150Gbps.

The company says it runs more than 550,000 .ua domains in total. This morning, all .ua web sites I tested from the UK were resolving normally.

Comment Tagged: .ua, hostmaster, ukraine

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?

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?

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

Cybersquatting cases down in .uk

The number of cybersquatting complaints, and the number of successful cybersquatting complaints, were down in .uk last year, according to new data from local registry Nominet.

Nominet said that its Dispute Resolution Service, which has a monopoly on .uk disputes, handled just 548 cases in 2021, the lowest number in the 20-year history of the DRS.

Only 43% of the complaints resulted in the domain being transferred, Nominet said. That’s down from 46% in 2020, 47% in 2019 and 49% in 2018, it said.

The trends fly in contrast to the UDRP, as least in WIPO’s experience in 2021, where cases were soaring.

General counsel Nick Wenban-Smith said in a press release:

Despite the worldwide shift towards online activity during the pandemic, and WIPO disputes on the increase, we haven’t seen a parallel pick up in the number of .UK domain name disputes for the past two years, but instead are reporting a record low in Complaints filed since the DRS launched back in 2001. We hope this is a result of our continued efforts to make .UK a safe place to be online.

Nominet has some pretty strict takedown practices in place — it will suspend a domain if the police’s intellectual property crime unit tells it to, which could clearly have an impact on the need to employ the DRS.

Comment Tagged: cybersquatting, drs, nominet, trademarks, udrp

GoDaddy among five companies competing for .za contract

Five companies are bidding for the contract to run the back-end for South Africa’s .za domains, which is expected to be awarded shortly.

Local ccTLD overseer ZADNA has named ZA Registry Consortium (ZARC), Lexreg and Fevertree Consulting Consortium, GoDaddy Registry, The Bean App & GMO Internet Group, and Catalytic Peter capital Consortium as respondents to its 2021 RFP.

Of those, only GoDaddy is a lone bidder, and the only one without an obvious South African partner. The rest are consortia, apparently newly created to bid for the contract.

ZARC is a venture of incumbent back-end ZA Central Registry and its affiliated commercial arm Domain Name Services, according to ZACR.

Lexreg and Fevertree Consulting Consortium appears to be made up of local corporate registrar Lexsynergy and a South African consulting firm.

The Bean App is a South African startup registrar. Its partner GMO is the Japanese registry provider behind .shop and a bunch of geographic and dot-brand gTLDs.

I’m sorry to say I have no idea what “Catalytic Peter” is. It has no internet footprint and ZADNA has not revealed any information beyond the name.

ZADNA said it is “currently at the advanced stage of the final checkpoints of the procurement process.”

.za has over 1.3 million domains and over 600 registrars. While ZACR currently runs four additional African geographic gTLDs, .za is by far its biggest deal in terms of registrations.

Comment Tagged: .za, fevertree, gmo, godaddy, godaddy registry, lexysynergy, rfp, the bean app, zacr, zadna

Registrar hit with second porn UDRP breach notice this year

A Chinese registrar group has been accused by ICANN of shirking its UDRP obligations for the second time this year.

ICANN has put Hong Kong-based DomainName Highway on notice that is in breach of its contract for failing to transfer the domain 1ockheedmartin.com to defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

The domain is a straightforward case of typosquatting, with the initial L replaced with a numeral 1. At time of writing, it still resolves to a page of pornographic thumbnail links, despite being lost in a UDRP case January 4.

Under UDRP rules, registrars have 10 days to transfer a UDRP-losing domain to the trademark owner, unless a lawsuit prevents it.

The circumstances are very similar to a breach notice ICANN issued against ThreadAgent.com over a case of BMW’s brand being cybersquatted with porn last month.

Both ThreadAgent and DomainName Highway appear to be part of the XZ.com, aka Xiamen DianMedia Network Technology Co, which is based in China but has about 20 accredited registrars based in Hong Kong.

DomainName Highway has about 30,000 gTLD domains under management.

Comment Tagged: breach, compliance, dotmedia, ICANN, udpr, xiamen dianmedia network technology, xz.com

Costa Rica’s only registrar gets terminated

Costa Rica no longer has any in-country accredited registrars, after ICANN terminated Toglodo for non-payment of fees.

ICANN told the company last week that its accreditation is terminated effective February 23.

It seems Toglodo owed ICANN thousands of dollars in past-due fees. The Org says had been chasing it for money since at least March last year, but had not managed to make contact.

The registrar once had a few thousand gTLD domains under management, mostly .coms, but that’s dwindled to almost nothing recently. Whatever domains remain, ICANN will attempt to transfer to another registrar.

Comment Tagged: compliance, ICANN, termination, toglodo

GoDaddy Registry to raise some TLD prices, lower others

GoDaddy Registry is to raise the base price of three of its recent acquired gTLDs and lower the price on three others.

The company is telling registrars that the prices of .biz, .club and .design domains are going up later this year, while the prices of .luxe, .abogado and .case are going down.

For .biz, which GoDaddy took over when it acquired Neustar’s registry business in 2020, the price will increase by $0.87 to $13.50.

While .biz hasn’t been price-regulated by ICANN since 2019, the new rise is lower than the annual 10% it was allowed to impose under its previous, price-capped contracts. It’s around 7% this year, roughly in line with .com’s capped increase. It will mean the price of a .biz has gone up by over 70% in the last decade.

For .club, which GoDaddy acquired last year, registrations, renewals and transfers are going up by a dollar to $10.95, the fourth consecutive year in which .club fees have increased.

It’s in the ball-park of what previous owner .CLUB Domains was already doing — .club launched in 2014 with a $8.05 fee, but that went up to $8.95 in 2019, then $9.45 in 2020, then $9.95 last year.

.club has about a million domains under management at the moment. If that level holds, it’s an extra million bucks a year to GoDaddy, which frankly will barely register on the company’s now billion-dollars-a-quarter income statement.

For lower-volume .design, another one of the 2021 acquisitions, the price is going up by $2 to $35.

All of these price changes go into effect September 1 this year, giving registrants over six months to lock-in their pricing for up to 10 years by committing to a multi-year renewal before the changes kick in.

Registrars in most cases pass on registry price increases to their customers, but they don’t have the same six-month notification obligations as registries.

For three other GoDaddy Registry TLDs, prices are coming down in the same timeframe, so registrants may wish to see if the savings are passed on in future by registrars.

.luxe prices are going down from $15 a year to $12, .abogado is going down from $25 to $20 and .casa is going down from $7.50 to $6. The latter two mean “lawyer” and “home” respectively in Spanish.

GoDaddy isn’t currently altering the regular price of the TLDs it acquired from MMX, but it is bumping the restore fee for expired domains by $10 to $40, bringing them into line with .com.

Comment Tagged: .abogado, .biz, .casa, .club, .luxe, godaddy, godaddy registry, price caps, prices

Supreme Court allows fight for .nu to proceed

A lawsuit fighting for control of the .nu ccTLD can go ahead, the Supreme Court of Sweden has ruled.

The court confirmed last week that the Government of Niue has standing to sue, despite a lower court ruling in favor of .nu registry IIS’s claims to the contrary two years ago.

The ruling means the case will go to trial, according to Niue representative Pär Brumark.

IIS is the ccTLD registry for Sweden’s .se, but it also took over Niue’s .nu, which coincidentally means “.now” in Swedish, from its original American manager in 2013.

Niue has been fighting for .nu to be returned to its control for over two decades. The ccTLD has proven popular with Swedish speakers, and has about 250,000 current registrations, making about $5 million a year.

That’s a lot of money for a tiny island nation like Niue, which has never seen any cash from .nu sales.

Niue sued in 2018 and defied convention by publicizing its IANA redelegation request in 2021.

Niue’s case was dismissed by a lower court in 2020 after the judge ruled the government lacked ability to sue in Swedish jurisdiction. That decision was overruled (pdf) last year by a Court of Appeals.

IIS appealed to the Supreme Court, which last week declined (pdf) to hear the case, upholding the appeals court ruling. There’s no further avenue of appeal.

The case now goes back to the court of first instance for a trial. A date has not been set.

Comment Tagged: .nu, iis, niue. .se

Liberties group appeals NIXI’s “two domains rule” brush-off

The Internet Freedom Foundations, an Indian online rights group, says it is continuing to try to find out why local registry NIXI has implemented a highly weird “two domains” rule.

The rule, which appeared in late December, requires registrars to ask the personal permission of NIXI’s CEO if a registrant wants to register more than two .in domains.

As NIXI acts under the authority of the Indian government, IFF filed a request last month under the country’s Right To Information Act, asking under what authority the rule was imposed and how NIXI reached its decision to impose it.

The terse reply (pdf) simply refers the reader to a clause of the registry-registrar agreement stating that NIXI can roll out new rules at will.

Its February 10 response adds: “Above decision is taken with respect to National Security.”

That’s exactly what NIXI CEO Anil Kumar Jain told DI a month earlier.

Because three or four of IFF’s questions went unanswered, the group says it has appealed the response and requested more transparency.

“Repeating ‘national security’ as a mantra to defeat transparency, even when not probably emerging from the topic of policy formation, is a growing tendency in decision making,” IFF said.

Comment Tagged: .in, iff, nixi

ICANN stuck between Ukraine and Russia in time zone debate

As the world waits nervously to see whether Russia’s weeks-long troop build-up on the Ukrainian border will result in an invasion, ICANN is embroiled in an infinitely more trivial conflict between the two nations.

As well as overseeing domain names, IP addresses and protocol numbers, a decade ago ICANN took over the time zone database that most of the world’s computers rely on to figure out what the correct time is or was.

The Time Zone Database or tzdb has been hosted by ICANN’s IANA unit since 2011, when it stepped in to relieve the previous host, which was being badgered in court by astrologers.

It’s managed and regularly updated — such as when a country changes its time zone or modifies its daylight savings practices — by Paul Eggert of the University of California.

While it’s apolitical, governed by IETF best practice, it occasionally finds itself in the firing line due to political controversies.

In recent years, a recurrent controversy — which has raised its head again this month in light of the current border crisis — has been the spelling of the Ukrainian capital city.

It has long been rendered in English as “Kiev”, but that’s the Latin-script transliteration of the Russian-Cyrillic spelling Киев, rather than the Ukrainian-Cyrillic spelling, Київ, which is transliterated as “Kyiv”.

With tensions between Russia and Ukraine intensifying since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Ukraine has for years appealed to the international community to change its “painful” spelling practices.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2019, part of its #CorrectUA and #KyivNotKiev campaigns, described the situation like this:

Under the Russian empire and later the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Russification was actively used as a tool to extinguish each constituent country’s national identity, culture and language. In light of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, including its illegal occupation of Crimea, we are once again experiencing Russification as a tactic that attempts to destabilize and delegitimize our country. You will appreciate, we hope, how the use of Soviet-era placenames – rooted in the Russian language – is especially painful and unacceptable to the people of Ukraine.

Many English-language news outlets — including the Associated Press and Guardian style guides, the BBC, New York Times and Wall Street Journal — have since switched to the “Kyiv” spelling, though many are still using “Kiev”.

The US and UK governments both currently use “Kyiv”. Wikipedia switched to “Kyiv” in 2020. ICANN’s own new gTLD program rules, which draw on international standards, would treat both “Kiev” and “Kyiv” as protected geographic names.

My Windows computer used “Kyiv”, but the clock on my Android phone uses “Kiev”.

The tzdb currently lists Kyiv’s time zone as “Europe/Kiev”, because it follows the English-language consensus, with the comments providing this October 2018 explanation from Eggert:

As is usual in tzdb, Ukrainian zones use the most common English spellings. For example, tzdb uses Europe/Kiev, as “Kiev” is the most common spelling in English for Ukraine’s capital, even though it is certainly wrong as a transliteration of the Ukrainian “Київ”. This is similar to tzdb’s use of Europe/Prague, which is certainly wrong as a transliteration of the Czech “Praha”. (“Kiev” came from old Slavic via Russian to English, and “Prague” came from old Slavic via French to English, so the two cases have something in common.) Admittedly English-language spelling of Ukrainian names is controversial, and some day “Kyiv” may become substantially more popular in English; in the meantime, stick with the traditional English “Kiev” as that means less disruption for our users.

Because the tzdb is incorporated in billions of installations of operating systems, programming frameworks and applications worldwide, a conservative approach to changes has been used for compatibility reasons.

In addition, the spelling in the database is not supposed to be exposed to end users. Developers may use tzdb in their code, but they’re encouraged to draw on resources such as the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository to localize their user interfaces.

As Eggert put it on the tzdb mailing list recently “the choice of spelling should not be important to end users, as the tzdb spelling is not intended to be visible to them”.

Based on past changes, it seems that “Kyiv” could one day before too long supplant “Kiev” in the tzdb, if the current political status quo remains and English-speaking nations increasingly support Ukraine’s independent sovereignty.

But if Russia should invade and occupy, who knows how the language will change?

This article has been part of an irregular series entitled “Murphy Feels Guilty About Covering Incredibly Serious Current Events With A Trivial Domain Angle, But He Writes A Domain Blog So Cut Him Some Slack FFS”.

Comment Tagged: iana, ICANN, time zone database, tzdb