As governments and companies around the world squeezed the Russian economy by imposing increasingly tighter financial sanctions for its invasion of neighboring Ukraine, Ukrainian officials demanded that Russia further punish by being completely removed from the internet.
On Monday, Ukrainian authorities petitioned ICANN and the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Center (RIPE NCC) to cancel domain names with the extensions “.ru” and “.su”. Also in Moscow and St. They asked for root servers in St. Petersburg to be shut down.
ICANN responded to the request by stating that it is not within the scope of ICANN’s mission to do so and it is not really possible to do so.
Göran Marby, ICANN CEO, replied to Andrii Nabok, ICANN’s representative to Ukraine, and Mykhailo Fedorov, deputy prime minister and minister of digital transformation, “as you know, the internet is a decentralized system. No actor can control it or shut it down.” “Our mission is not to take punitive actions, impose sanctions, or restrict access to parts of the internet regardless of provocation. In fact, ICANN was built to make the internet work, not to use its coordinating role to stop it from working.”
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