Even if we wanted to, which we don’t, we can’t, so we won’t, says boss
ICANN on Wednesday rebuffed a request from Mykhailo Fedorov, First Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine, to revoke all Russian web domains, shut down Russian DNS root servers, and invalidate associated TLS/SSL certificates in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Fedorov made his request because Russia’s assault has been “made possible mainly due to Russia propaganda machinery using websites continuously spreading disinformation, hate speech, promoting violence and hiding the truth about the war in Ukraine.” In a publicly posted reply [ PDF], Göran Marby, CEO of ICANN, said his organization is an independent technical body charged with overseeing the global internet’s DNS and unique identifiers and must maintain neutrality. “ICANN is a facilitator of the security, stability, and resiliency of these identifiers with the objective of a single, global, interoperable Internet,” said Marby. “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. Essentially, ICANN has been built to ensure that the Internet works, not for its coordination role to be used to stop it from working.” Moreover, Marby said ICANN does not have the authority to do what Fedorov asked. “For country-code top-level domains, our work predominantly involves validating requests that come from authorized parties within the respective country or territory,” Marby wrote. “The globally agreed policies do not provide for ICANN to take unilateral action to disconnect these domains as you request.” The root server system, he said, is maintained by independent operators. And ICANN does not have the ability to revoke the mentioned TLS/SSL certificates.
