Even as governments and corporations around the globe squeeze the Russian economy through increasingly stringent financial sanctions for the country’s invasion of its neighbor, Ukraine, some within the aggrieved nation have sought to punish Russia further, by kicking it off the internet entirely.
On Monday, a pair of Ukrainian officials petitioned ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) as well as the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC), to revoke the domains “.ru”, “.рф” and “.su.” They also asked that root servers in Moscow and St. Petersburg be shut down — potentially knocking websites unde those domains offline. On Thursday, ICANN responded to the request with a hard pass citing that doing so is not within the scope of ICANN’s mission and that it’s not really feasible to do in the first place.
“As you know, the Internet is a…
