ICANN Offers Funds to Protect Ukraine DNS, Nixes Russian ccTLD Revocation

ICANN made $1 million available to help maintain internet access for Ukrainians, it said Monday. The organization earlier refused the Ukraine government's request that it revoke country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) .ru and .su to limit Russian internet access. ICANN "has a longstanding practice of coming to the technical support and aid of technical providers, such as ccTLD managers, to enable them to stay connected to the Internet's DNS [domain name system] and continue servicing their customers and region during times of crisis," a March 6 board resolution said. This time, board members also directed ICANN to provide funding to Ukraine "to support maintaining access to Internet infrastructure through these challenges." The funding runs until year's end. ICANN must work with other organizations on this, President Goran Marby told us at a virtual executive team Q&A at this week's ICANN meeting from San Juan, Puerto Rico: Help could involve satellite terminals, but it's too early to say and so far there has been no request from the Ukraine government. Also Monday, ICANN responded to concerns about domain name registrants in Ukraine being unable to renew their domains in a timely manner. It's considering the events in the region an extenuating circumstance under the 2013 registrar accreditation agreement, meaning registrars can extend renewal periods for people in affected areas. Earlier this month, the Ukrainian government asked ICANN to temporarily or permanently revoke the Russian ccTLDs and shutter DNS servers there (see 2203020002). But in a March 2 reply, Marby said ICANN's primary role with ccTLDs involves validating requests that come from authorized parties within the respective country or territory, and ICANN can't take unilateral actions to disconnect domains: Such a change in ICANN's process "would have devastating and permanent effects on the trust and utility of this global system." In addition, he said, the root server system is made up of many geographically distributed nodes maintained by independent operators. Nor can ICANN control internet access or content, he wrote; it must remain neutral and act in support of the global internet.