Russia blames DNSSEC, not Ukraine, for internet downtime

Another ccTLD has blamed DNSSEC after seeing hours of downtime affecting its country’s biggest web services yesterday.

This time it’s Russia’s ccTLD.ru, which confirmed today that it was responsible for the widely reported outages on Tuesday, which had sparked speculation that a cyber-attack related to the war in Ukraine might be the culprit.

It was rather a DNSSEC failure that affected both .ru and the Cyrillic .рф domains, the registry said. It was related to a cryptograpghic key rollover, the registry indicated.

“After the failure was detected, the updated keys were revoked, and the functionality of the .RU zone was fully restored, which took about two hours, including the distribution of data through the DNS system,” the registry said on its web site.

“The investigation into the incident is currently ongoing, but it is already clear that the main cause of the failure was the imperfection of the software used to create the encryption keys,” it added.

The explanation was echoed by Russian government officials on social media, and it’s sadly rather plausible. DNSSEC failures at ccTLDs, and to a lesser extent gTLDs, usually related to fluffed key rollovers, are rather common.

There have been similar outages reported in the last few years in Australia (twice), Namibia, Fiji, and Sweden. And those are just the ones reported on this blog. People who track this kind of thing more closely have recorded hundreds of incidents.

.ru domains fly off the shelf as Western sanctions bite

Russia’s ccTLD has posted very impressive growth in registrations for 2023, attributable largely to sanctions related to the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

ccTLD.ru, the registry for .ru and .рф, reported that it ended 2023 with 5,439,137 .ru domains, an increase of 506,024 or 10.3% over the year. It said 85% of the names were registered by Russians.

It said 1,709,718 new domains were registered in .ru, with over 200,000 being registered per month by December.

For comparison with fellow top-10 ccTLDs, Germany’s .de grew by 201,000 names last year, and Brazil’s .br grew by 220,000. The UK’s .uk shrank and the Netherlands’ .nl was basically flat.

In the smaller Cyrllic .рф, the growth rate was even greater — 13.7%, with 768,883 domains in total at the end of the year, up 92,769 names, the registry said.

Despite the rapid growth, .ru is still a bit off its 2017 peak of around 5.53 million domains, according to my database.

In a press release, ccTLD.ru director Andrey Vorobyev admitted that one of the “main drivers” of the growth were Russians transferring their sites to Russia “under the pressure of sanctions”.

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many domain registries and registrars in the West unilaterally decided to stop doing business with Russian citizens and organizations, despite US government sanctions specifically not applying to domains.

GoDaddy cut off Russians and .ru while Namecheap, which has many support staff in Ukraine, cut off Russian customers and continues to prominently fund-raise for Ukraine on its storefront. Other companies announcing boycotts included 101domain, IONOS and Nominet.

Ukraine’s ccTLD, .ua, has fared less well during the crisis. Its total domain count shrank by about 77,000 to 514,000 in 2023, according to my database. The local registry, Hostmaster, had frozen deletions for a period to give people who had been displaced or mobilized more time to renew, but started releasing those domains last year.

Hostmaster has reported adoption of certain third-level geographic .ua domains that use Latin transliterations of Ukrainian place names, rather than Russian — .kyiv.ua versus .kiev.ua for example — as citizens seek to “de-Russify” their holdings.

Russia cuts off ICANN funding after pro-Ukraine stance

Russia did not pay its usual annual tribute to ICANN in the Org’s fiscal 2023, newly published funding data reveals.

Coordination Center for TLD RU usually funnels $50,000 a year into ICANN’s budget, but that was reduced to nothing in the year to June 30, 2023, according to ICANN’s FY23 annual report, published today.

While it could of course be a coincidence, I rather suspect it’s retaliation for ICANN’s overt support for Ukraine following Russia’s invasion last year.

ccTLD.ru counts the Russian Ministry of Communications and Mass Media as one of its “founding members”.

ICANN donated $1 million to the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster, a relief organization, to support Ukrainians affected by the war, and gave the Ukrainian government a platform to denounce the war at a public meeting.

Later last year, ICANN also lobbied against the Russian candidate for ITU secretary general.

The .ru registry was not the only ccTLD operator to slash funding in FY23.

Belgium already said it would cut its donation from $75,000 to $25,000 in protest at “mission creep” and perceived failures to deal with privacy regulations, and the annual report shows it made good on its threat.

But it seems to have been joined by the Netherlands and Denmark, which cut their contributions respectively by $45,000 to $180,000 and by $30,800 to $30,000. Slovenia halved its donation to $5,000.

Overall, ccTLD contributions were down $176,535 to $2,214,240.

ICANN’s bean-counters probably won’t be losing any sleep over the decline; the Org’s overall funding was $150 million in the year.

Almost five million Russian domains registered

Coordination Center for TLD RU broke through the four-million-domain milestone for the Russian ccTLD .ru on Monday, according to a press release.
Including internationalized domain names under .РФ, of which there are 800,000, ccTLD.ru is managing closer to five million domains.
It took 11 months to grow from 3.5 million domains, according to the registry.
The .ru zone is the fifth-largest ccTLD, after .de, .tk, .uk, and .nl, according to Verisign’s last Domain Name Industry Brief.

Little interest in Russian gTLDs?

Despite being given the opportunity to launch top-level domains in Cyrillic script, only a handful of companies from Russia are expected to apply to ICANN for new gTLDs.
That’s according to Andrey Kolesnikov, CEO of Coordination Center for TLD RU, which runs the country’s .ru and .РФ registries.
“There won’t be many applications from Russia, only from about 10 companies,” he said at a recent press conference, while estimating at least 1,000 applications overall.
Just 10 applicants is a surprisingly low estimate, given the resurgence of interest in Russian domain names in 2011.
The year-old .РФ (.rf, for Russian Federation) domain has been a roaring success in volume terms. Launched in late 2010, it now has about a million registered domains.
CC itself is planning to apply for .ДЕТИ, which means “.children” in Russian.
RU-Center, the largest Russian registrar, intends to apply for the city-gTLDs .МОСКВА and .moscow.
Other IDN-friendly nations may be more enthusiastic about new gTLDs. ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said last week that he heard that Indian companies could apply for as many as 100.

Russian registry to apply for “.children”

The Russian .ru domain name registry has announced plans to apply for .ДЕТИ, the Russian word for “.children”, under ICANN’s new generic top-level domains program.
It’s the first public announcement of a top-level internationalized domain name that is not geographic nor a transliteration of an existing TLD.
Coordination Center for TLD RU, the registry, said that the initiative was inspired by the success of .РФ (.rf), which is on track to register its millionth domain before the end of the year.
Registry CEO Andrey Kolesnikov said in a statement: “We kicked off preparations for the applying for another top-level domain – .ДЕТИ, which should for an Internet space reserved exclusively for the youngest users.”
IDN gTLDs are one of the benefits of the new gTLD program that nobody — not even trademark interests — disputes, but until now there were no “proper” examples to cite.
VeriSign and Afilias have already announced plans for IDN versions of their existing gTLDs – .com, .net and .info – and ICANN has approved IDN ccTLDs for a couple dozen nations.

One in five .рф domains have web sites

The .рф registry celebrated its first launch anniversary last week, with almost one million .рф names registered and apparently almost one in five domains with an active web site.
According to RU-Center, which says it is the registrar of record for 40% of .рф (.rf) names, about 18% of the Cyrillic domains registered in the last year resolve to full web sites.
The registrar said in a press release:

18% of names have website, 16% do redirect, 4% are on parking, 15% are just delegated but not available, and 15% have a plug webpage. 29% of .RF names are unused.

That compares to the 18.7% use penetration of .info, which has been around for over a decade, assuming RU-Center and Afilias compiled their numbers using a similar methodology.
RU-Center also said that 94% of .рф sunrise registrations have been renewed. The rate of landrush registration renewals, which give an indication of what speculators think of the space, will not be clear until December, it said.
It is apparently now also possible for non-Russians to obtain .рф domains.