ICANN offers $1 million to Ukraine projects, supports Ukrainian registrants

ICANN has allocated $1 million to help protect internet access in war-torn Ukraine.

Its board of directors at the weekend voted to set aside the “initial sum” of money “to provide financial assistance to support access to Internet infrastructure in emergency situations.”

There’s an expectation that the cash will be spent “on support for maintaining Internet access for users within Ukraine”, where the Russian invasion is described as “tragic and profoundly troubling”, over the next few months, the board said.

It’s not clear yet exactly how the money will be spent, though something related to the keeping the DNS up and running would seem to be the most probable. The resolution calls for the CEO to develop a process to figure it out.

Ukraine’s ccTLD manager, Hostmaster, moved its servers into other European countries shortly after the invasion, and signed up to Cloudlflare’s DDoS protection service. It’s not clear whether it had to spend money on these moves.

ICANN’s million will come from its regular operating budget, not the stash it has set aside from its new gTLD auctions. The auction money will probably be spent on similar things eventually, but the process for allocating that is still being worked out in a committee.

ICANN also said this week that it is, as I and others suggested, exercising section 3.7.5.1 of its Registrar Accreditation Agreement to declare the invasion an “extenuating circumstance”, meaning Ukrainians who are unable to renew their domain name registrations before they expire may not lose them.

Registrars now have the option to keep these domains registered after their usual expiration date and ICANN will not send its Compliance enforcers after them.

“We encourage registrars and registries to support this action and take these circumstances into consideration when reviewing impacted registrants’ renewal delinquencies in affected regions,” ICANN said.

It’s the first time ICANN has exercised this power in connection with a human-made disaster. It previously invoked 3.7.5.1 in response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and worldwide in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Hostmaster itself has extended the redemption period for .ua domains from 30 to 60 days.

Here’s a way ICANN could actually help the people of Ukraine

ICANN may have today decided to decline Ukraine’s request for Russian and Belarusian top-level domains to be taken down, but there’s still at least one way it could do a little bit to help the country’s citizens.

ICANN has the power to help make sure Ukrainian registrants’ domain names don’t expire, which would render their email and web sites unusable if they are unable to access the internet to pay for renewals for an extended period.

The Org is able to waive the contractual requirement for registrars to cancel domains that have not been renewed, in the event of “extenuating circumstances”.

ICANN has used this power twice before. The first time when Hurricane Maria hit the Caribbean in 2017. The second was when the ongoing coronavirus pandemic hit the world in April 2020.

In both cases, ICANN invoked section 3.7.5.1 of the standard Registrar Accreditation Agreement and said the circumstances amounted to a “natural disaster”.

But there’s nothing in the RAA that limits “extenuating circumstances” to just “natural disasters”. The term “natural disasters” does not appear in the contract.

The contract says “other circumstance as approved specifically by ICANN” is a good enough reason to waive the deletion requirements.

It appears that ICANN can unilaterally decide whether the war in Ukraine is a sufficiently “extenuating circumstance” to give Ukrainian domain name owners a break when it comes to renewals.

GoDaddy stops selling .ru domains, commits money to support Ukraine

Domain registrar market-share leader GoDaddy will no longer sell .ru domain names, and has reached into its pocket to provide financial support for Ukraine relief efforts.

In a two-pronged response to the Russian invasion, the company outlined several measures aimed at both supporting Ukraine and putting some sanction-style pressure on Russia.

It’s not kicking out existing Russian registrants, but it is, according to a statement:

• Removing the Russian version of our website
• No longer supporting new registrations of .ru and .ru.com
• Removing all .ru domain names from our domain name aftermarket
• Removing the Russian Ruble

“What’s happened in Ukraine is horrible. We do not condone the unwarranted aggression from the Russian Government,” the statement says.

For Ukrainian customers, GoDaddy is renewing their products and services due to expire in the next 60 days for free.

“Customers can also contact us at any time, and if they need something specific, we’ll help them as best we can,” the company added.

It’s also donating $500,000 to humanitarian relief in Ukraine, donation-matching its employees’ gifts, and offering to help pay its Ukrainian contractors’ salaries for the next 60 days.

Other registrars to share their support for Ukraine so far include Namecheap, Tucows, IONOS and Gandi.

Gandi says it supports Ukraine but WON’T cut off Russians

Gandi has become the latest large registrar to issue a statement about the war in Ukraine, saying that while it deplores the violence it won’t be disconnecting Russian customers.

CEO Stephan Ramoin wrote that Gandi “condemns” the invasion and is “working on supporting Ukraine, according to the suggestions of our Ukrainian tech colleagues”, adding:

The internet is about including all humanity and working toward a greater goal, giving every human being a voice and a clear vision of the world, not excluding and antagonizing one group of people against another. That’s why we want to support the people of Russia and Belarus expressing their disagreement with this war. We don’t need to escalate, war is not the answer.

Cutting off Russians and Belarusians would only encourage the creation of different closed worlds and digital networks. We have chosen to hold out our hand to these people. We are not at war with them. Only their leaders, and their madness, need to be stopped. We will of course react quickly against war propaganda of any kind.

The statement follows those coming from Namecheap and IONOS, which have both this week announced their intentions to remove most Russian and Belarusian customers.

Based in Paris, Gandi is one of the oldest registrars and has over 1.3 million gTLD domains under management.

Now IONOS kicks out Russian customers

IONOS has become the second major registrar to say it will turf out its Russian customers in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

The company’s board of directors today issued a statement expressing support for the people of Ukraine and saying:

To support worldwide sanctions on Russia, we are not accepting any new customer contracts from Russia and are also terminating existing relationships with Russian customers. This also applies to business relationships with Russian service providers and suppliers. We are currently reviewing all existing supplier contracts.

The directors said that many of their colleagues come from Ukraine and have family in the region.

It’s not immediately clear whether the ban applies to domain name registrants as well as hosting customers, and what options Russian registrants have been given. An IONOS spokesperson said the details are still being worked out.

Earlier in the week, US-based registrar Namecheap, which has its customer support based in Ukraine, gave its Russian registrants notice to transfer their names elsewhere. It later said it would offer free domains to Russian dissidents.

While a little smaller than Namecheap, IONOS is part of Germany-based United-Internet and, with over five million names, a top-10 registrar in terms of gTLD domains under management.

ICANN says NO to Ukraine’s Big Ask

“ICANN has been built to ensure that the Internet works, not for its coordination role to be used to stop it from working.”

That’s ICANN’s response to Ukraine, which earlier this week asked for Russia to lose its top-level domains and IP addresses, to help prevent propaganda supporting its invasion of the country.

The request was arguably based on a misunderstanding of the extent of ICANN’s powers, and CEO Göran Marby says as much in his response last night (pdf) to Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov:

In our role as the technical coordinator of unique identifiers for the Internet, we take actions to ensure that the workings of the Internet are not politicized, and we have no sanction-levying authority

He goes on to warn about the “devastating and permanent effects” of ICANN suddenly deciding to take unilateral action against .ru, .рф and .su:

For country-code top-level domains, our work predominantly involves validating requests that come from authorized parties within the respective country or territory. The globally agreed policies do not provide for ICANN to take unilateral action to disconnect these domains as you request. You can understand why such a system cannot operate based on requests from one territory or country concerning internal operations within another territory or country. Such a change in the process would have devastating and permanent effects on the trust and utility of this global system.

He concludes:

Within our mission, we maintain neutrality and act in support of the global Internet. Our mission does not extend to taking punitive actions, issuing sanctions, or restricting access against segments of the Internet — regardless of the provocations. ICANN applies its policies consistently and in alignment with documented processes. To make unilateral changes would erode trust in the multistakeholder model and the policies designed to sustain global Internet interoperability.

The response is expected, and I believe broadly, if not unanimously, supported in the ICANN community.

In a line I wish I’d written, the Internet Society’s CEO Andrew Sullivan put it pretty succinctly in a blog post yesterday:

The idea of unplugging a country is as wrong when people want to do it to another country as it is when governments want to do it to their own.

And Sébastien Bachollet, chair of ICANN stakeholder group EURALO, insisted (pdf) that “the Internet must remain intact”.

RIPE NCC, which had been asked to revoke IP addresses supplied to Russian organizations, wrote that it “believes that the means to communicate should not be affected by domestic political disputes, international conflicts or war.”

ICANN may take a short-term PR hit in the wider world, which includes people who have a misunderstanding of how powerful ICANN is and how tenuous its grasp on the powers it does have.

While .ru appears to be safe, there’s nothing I read in Marby’s letter that would preclude it from initiating retirement proceedings against .su, when the proper policies have been approved.

Namecheap offers free services to Russian dissidents

Namecheap will offer “free anonymous domain registration and free web hosting” to anti-war protest web sites based in Russia or Belarus.

The registrar said in a statement today that the move is in response to imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s call for war protests in Russia.

The offer modifies the company’s hard-line position from earlier in the week, in which it banned Russians altogether from its services and gave registrants there a week to get out.

Namecheap’s English-language customer service is based in Ukraine, including in cities under heavy bombardment this week.

Russians interested in the free hosting offer are asked to contact customer service for details.

CENTR kicks out Russia

CENTR, the association of European domain registries, has kicked out the Russian ccTLD operator due to the war in Ukraine.

In a brief statement today, the organization said:

The CENTR Board is following Russian military actions in Ukraine with concern and strongly condemns the violation of international law and Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Ukraine’s national TLD registry is a member of CENTR and we stand with Ukrainians in their efforts to resist Russia’s invasion. We hope for a swift and peaceful resolution of the conflict, and will continue to offer support and help to our Ukrainian colleagues.

Knowledge and information sharing are key to CENTR’s mission, and the CENTR Board needs to safeguard trust within the CENTR community. The Board has therefore decided to suspend the membership of the Coordination Center for TLD RU/РФ, effective immediately. The Board would like to underline that this is in no way targeted at our Russian colleagues. This suspension will be assessed by the CENTR General Assembly at their meeting in March.

I’m not sure the move will have much of an impact on the Coordination Center, but it’s a strong gesture of solidarity with the people of Ukraine, and the latest response from the domain industry to Russia’s insane war.

Ukraine asks ICANN to turn off Russia’s internet, but it’s a bad idea

Ukraine has asked ICANN to take down Russia’s top-level domains.

Andrii Nabok, the Ukrainian official on ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee made the request, asking the Org to “Revoke, permanently or temporarily, the domains .ru, .рф and .su” in a widely circulated email last night.

He also asked for DNS root servers in Moscow and St Petersburg to be shut down, and said he’s written to RIPE NCC to request IP addresses issued to Russian organizations to be withdrawn.

The request came on the fifth day of the Russian invasion, amid widespread, swingeing international sanctions targeting the Russian economy and high net worth individuals.

Accusing Russia of “war crimes”, Nabok wrote:

These atrocious crimes 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. Ukrainian IT infrastructure has undergone numerous attacks from the Russian side impeding citizens’ and government’s ability to communicate.

Moreover, it’s becoming clear that this aggression could spread much further around the globe as the Russian Federation puts the nuclear deterrent on “special alert” and threatens both Sweden and Finland with “military and political consequences” if these states join NATO. Such developments are unacceptable in the civilized, peaceful world, in the XXI century.

Reaction in the community has been more mixed than I would have expected, but I think on balance more people are saying that turning off .ru et al would be a terrible idea, and I’m basically with that majority.

While there’s no doubt that Russia is spreading a lot of misinformation, I’m not sure there’s a direct, clear, demonstrable causal link between propaganda published on .ru domains and the missiles currently raining down on Kyiv that could be remedied by deleting a few lines from a database.

I’ve no doubt ICANN now has a painful decision to make, but I don’t think ICANN is the place to achieve this kind of goal and I think ICANN agrees with me.

We don’t want those clowns deciding what can and can’t be published on the internet, trust me.

Not even in the extraordinary circumstances we find ourselves in today.

ICANN is not competent enough, smart enough, or ethical enough to have that kind of power.

It is smart enough to accept its own limitations, however, and it has a strong enough sense of self-preservation to know that to accept Ukraine’s demands would be to sign its own death warrant.

ICANN only has power, and its execs only pull in the big salaries, because it has the consensus support of the internet community.

For 20 years outsiders, such as the ITU and more lately blockchain projects, have sought to chip away at that consensus and replace the multistakeholder model with multilateralism or crypto-based wish-thinking.

Turning off a nation’s TLD would play exactly into the narrative that DNS oversight is dangerously centralized, dangerously Americanized, and ripe for replacement.

That could not only lead to the death of ICANN but also the death of the open, interoperable, international internet.

As much as I support sanctions against Russia, and have nothing but respect and admiration for the people of Ukraine, I fear this is an ask too far.

Namecheap boss goes nuclear on Russian customers

Namecheap has banned all Russians from its services in a comprehensive, surprising, and unprecedented expression of solidarity with Ukraine, the invaded country where most of its support staff are based.

CEO Richard Kirkendall said yesterday that Namecheap, which has over 14 million domains under management, “will no longer be providing services to users registered in Russia”, in an email to Russian customers.

Namecheap says it has over 1,000 employees in Ukraine.

It uses a company there called Zone3000 for its English-language customer support, from three locations across the country, mostly in Kharkiv, one of the cities that has been particularly affected by the Russian invasion over the last five days.

Kirkendall has given Russian customers until March 6, one week from the time of the email, to move to another registrar.

The email was posted online, and I’ve confirmed with Namecheap that it’s accurate. Kirkendall said:

Unfortunately, due to the Russian regime’s war crimes and human rights violations in Ukraine, we will no longer be providing services to users registered in Russia. While we sympathize that this war may not affect your own views or opinion on the matter, the fact is, your authoritarian government is committing human rights abuses and engaging in war crimes so this is a policy decision we have made and will stand by.

If you hold any top-level domains with us, we ask that you transfer them to another provider by March 6, 2022.

I’m told the words “any top-level domains” just means ‘any domains in any TLDs’.

Kirkendall went on to say that anyone using Russian and Belarusian ccTLDs — .ru, .xn--p1ai (.рф), .by, .xn--90ais (.бел), and .su — will no longer be able to use Namecheap’s email or hosting services.

After some negative replies, accusing Namecheap of going too far, Kirkendall wrote:

We haven’t blocked the domains, we are asking people to move. There are plenty of other choices out there when it comes to infrastructure services so this isn’t “deplatforming”. I sympathize with people that are not pro regime but ultimately even those tax dollars they may generate go to the regime. We have people on the ground in Ukraine being bombarded now non stop. I cannot with good conscience continue to support the Russian regime in any way, shape or form. People that are getting angry need to point that at the cause, their own government. If more grace time is necessary for some to move, we will provide it. Free speech is one thing but this decision is more about a government that is committing war crimes against innocent people that we want nothing to do with.

It’s by some way the strongest stance anyone in the domain industry has yet taken on the war in Ukraine.

Namecheap intends to issue a formal statement outlining its position later today.