I get a wrongful kicking as .su registry denies turn-off plan

The registry for the former Soviet Union’s .su ccTLD has denied that ICANN plans to kick it off the internet, giving three reasons why its over 100,000 domains are safe.

RosNIIROS pointed to Russian law, ICANN ccTLD policy, and the lack of any formal retirement notice as reasons why the ccTLD isn’t going anywhere. The registry said in a post on its web site:

In connection with the media reports about the possible closure of the .SU domain zone, we inform you that this information periodically appears in the public domain, but does not correspond to reality. The registry (RosNIIROS) does not plan to liquidate the .SU domain and no formal actions have been taken by ICANN

The registry said that .su has been formally recognised under Russian law, via a ruling of the telecoms regulator Roskomnadzor, alongside .ru and .рф, as part of the “Russian national domain zone”.

It added that ICANN policy does not permit the Org to retire .su:

According to the procedure approved in 2022 by ICANN, a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) can be removed from the DNS root zone only if the corresponding two-letter code is excluded from the ISO 3166 standard. Currently, the code “SU” is included in the ISO 3166 list with the status of “exclusively reserved”

The machine translation may be a bit wonky there, as the term used in English is “exceptionally reserved”. That’s the ISO 3166 status also enjoyed by the UK (.uk), Ascension Islands (.ac) and European Union (.eu).

But the ICANN policy on retiring ccTLDs specifically calls out .uk, .ac and .eu as being “grandfathered” in. It doesn’t mention .su at all, and it’s not at all clear from my reading whether being “exceptionally reserved” offers .su blanket protection.

ICANN’s former chair didn’t seem to think so in 2022 when he said, “the Soviet Union is no longer assigned in the ISO 3166-1 standard and therefore is no longer considered eligible for a ccTLD.”

RosNIIROS also referred its customers to the recent comments of ICANN director Becky Burr, who on March 12 had denied that ICANN had kicked off formal retirement proceedings.

I hadn’t listened to this session live, but I caught up with the recording today and have to say it’s a bit of an eye-opener. Burr said:

Let me just take the elephant in the room. We all saw the Domain Incite report on .su. I just want to say to everybody, there has been no formal letter kicking off any process on there, that’s clear. We are looking at the ccNSO policy, and I don’t want to say anything more about that other than to say whatever was in the Domain Incite article, there has been no formal initiation of a retirement process

I’m not sure whether to be irritated or flattered.

On the one hand, I seem to have received a public dressing down with the clear implication that there was some inaccuracy in my reporting, which is never nice. On the other hand, I didn’t write the damned article she’s referring to.

Burr seems to have read Domain Name Wire’s wonderful scoop on “plans to retire the [.su] domain” and just assumed it was my work. I’ll have to take it as a compliment, I guess. Cheers Becky!

The DNW article reported from the outset that a planned notice of retirement had not yet been sent, but that informal outreach had occurred, so I don’t even think there’s a clear allegation of inaccuracy here. For what it’s worth, I trust the reporting.

The day after Burr’s comment, ICANN CEO Kurt Lindqvist also said publicly that there had not yet been a “formal” notice of retirement.

“No timeline” to retire Soviet Union from the DNS

There is currently “no timeline” to remove the Soviet Union’s ccTLD from the internet, according to ICANN’s new CEO.

Asked by yours truly during the Public Forum at ICANN 82 whether retirement proceedings had been initiated against .su, Kurt Lindqvist responded, according to the real-time transcript:

ICANN has been in discussions with the managers of .su regarding retirement of the ccTLD for many, many years. There has not been sent a formal notice of removal to the ccTLD manager and no timeline for sending one, discussions will be keep on going and following the ccNSO retirement policy.

The words “formal notice of removal” might be doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

Domain Name Wire scooped earlier this week that on February 8 ICANN had privately told Russian Institute for Development of Public Networks (ROSNIIROS), the .su registry, that it planned to retire the ccTLD by 2030.

DNW noted that a formal notice of removal had been due to be sent and published February 13, but had not.

With Lindqvist today saying that there is “no timeline for sending one”, it seems the matter might have been put to bed for now.

It would have been an incredibly ballsy move to start the process of taking down .su — beloved by Russians and groups in Russian-occupied Ukraine — at this particular point in history.

At the time DNW reported ICANN’s letter to ROSNIIROS was sent, US president Donald Trump had yet to publicly begin peace talks with Russia and Ukraine, but his openly pro-Russian statements on the conflict since his February 12 phone call with Vladimir Putin have alarmed many.

Trump probably isn’t an FSB asset, but he certainly plays one on TV.

Would ICANN want to risk pissing off the unpredictable leader of the country whose jurisdiction it lies within? Or Russia, which might try to make its life difficult in other internet governance fora?

Three years ago, at ICANN 73, ICANN’s then-chair said that the Soviet Union, which disbanded over 30 years ago, is “no longer considered eligible for a ccTLD”.

I first floated the idea of ICANN taking down .su the day after the 2022 Ukraine invasion.

Soviet Union “no longer considered eligible for a ccTLD”, ICANN chair confirms

The former Soviet Union’s .su domain could soon embark along the years-long path to getting kicked off the internet, ICANN’s chair has indicated.

The .su ccTLD, which survived the death of the USSR thirty years ago “is no longer considered eligible for a ccTLD”, Martin Botterman said in response to a question by yours truly at the ICANN 73 Public Forum yesterday.

It seems ICANN will no longer turn a blind eye to .su’s continued existence, and that the policy enabling ccTLDs to be “retired” could be invoked in this case, after it is finalized.

The question I asked, per the transcript, was:

While it is generally accepted that ICANN is not in the business of deciding what is or is not a country, do you agree that the Soviet Union does not meet the objective criteria for ccTLD eligibility? And would you support dot SU entering the ccTLD retirement process as and when that process is approved?

I went into a lot of the background of .su in a post a couple weeks ago, and I’m not going to rehash it all here.

I wasn’t expecting much of a response from ICANN yesterday. Arguments over contested ccTLDs, which usually involve governments, are one of the things ICANN is almost always pretty secretive about.

So I was pleasantly surprised that Botterman, while he may have dodged a direct answer to the second part of the question, answered the first part with pretty much no equivocation. He said, per the recording:

It is correct that the Soviet Union is no longer assigned in the ISO 3166-1 standard and therefore is no longer considered eligible for a ccTLD.

ICANN Org has actually held discussions with the managers of the .su domain in the past to arrange an orderly retirement of the domain, and the ccNSO asked ICANN Org starting in 2010 and reiterated in 2017 to pause its efforts to retire the domain so that the Policy Development Process could be conducted. And that is a request we have honored.

So we’re glad to report that the ccNSO recently concluded that Policy Development Process and sent its policy recommendations to the ICANN board.

We will soon evaluate the ccNSO policy recommendations, and we will do so in line with the bylaws process.

It looked and sounded very much like he was reading these words from his screen, rather than riffing off-the-cuff, suggesting the answer had been prepared in advance.

I wasn’t able to attend the forum live, and I’d submitted the question via email to the ICANN session moderator a few hours in advance, giving plenty of time for Botterman or somebody else at ICANN to prepare a response.

The ccNSO policy referred to (pdf), which has yet to be approved by the ICANN board, creates a process for the removal of a ccTLD from the DNS root in scenarios such as the associated country ceasing to exist.

It’s creatively ambiguous — deliberately so, in my view — when it comes to .su’s unique circumstances, presenting at least two hurdles to its retirement.

First, the Soviet Union stopped being an officially recognized country in the early 1990s, long before this policy, and even ICANN itself, existed.

Second, the .su manager, ROSNIIROS, is not a member of the ccNSO and its debatable whether ICANN policies even apply to it.

In both of these policy stress tests, the ccNSO deferred to ICANN, arguably giving it substantial leeway on whether and how to apply the policy to .su.

I think it would be a damn shame if the Org didn’t at least try.

While it’s widely accepted that ICANN made the correct call by declining to remove Russia’s .ru from the root, allowing .su to continue to exist when it is acknowledged to no longer be eligible for ccTLD status, and the policy tools exist to remove it, could increasingly look like an embarrassing endorsement in light of Russian hostilities in former Soviet states.