Ukraine wants Russia to be cut off from the global Internet. Experts say this is a risky idea

But the same management experts are skeptical that Ukraine’s request will eventually be met. On the one hand, they say, this would set a dangerous precedent that could authorize authoritarian countries to make such demands. On the other hand, it is unclear whether ICANN could make such a decision, even if many want it. In addition, they added, cutting off Russia from the rest of the digital world could give the Kremlin exactly what it wants: citizens who do not have access to foreign information.

Governments like China seek to isolate their own people from the outside digital world. But Ukraine’s request is unprecedented, according to Vint Serf, widely considered one of the fathers of the Internet.

“For the first time, I remember a government asking ICANN to intervene in the normal operation of the domain name system on such a scale,” Cerf told CNN Business.

“The Internet works largely because of significant levels of trust among the many components of its ecosystem,” Serf added. “Acting on this request would have negative consequences in many dimensions.”

How it can work

As part of his request, Nabok said the Russian Internet code of the state .RU and its Cyrillic equivalents should be abolished. Nabok also said he was sending a separate request to the regional Internet registry of Europe and Central Asia, asking him to take back all the IP addresses he had assigned to Russia.

Internet governors say that while it is possible to imagine how Ukraine’s proposal might work, its implementation is a different matter altogether. In theory, disconnecting .RU from the global Internet could be as simple as deleting a series of instructions from key root servers around the world that are currently telling web browsers where to go when they want to access a Russian website. said Mitch Stoltz, senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Digital Rights Group.

Meanwhile, returning Russian IP addresses would be like removing the nail that holds a picture attached to a wall, said Mallory Nodel, chief technology officer at the Center for Democracy and Technology’s US-based think tank. Just as the picture will no longer have a place to live on the wall, so Russian websites will disappear from the Internet because they do not have a specific place to sit.

It would also mean that smartphones, computers and other connected devices in Russia will no longer be able to access the wider Internet because they will no longer assign IP addresses that can identify those devices to a global network, Knodel said.

It is possible that Russia has enough of its own local version of the Internet, replicated so that Russian Internet users can connect to each other for a while, but the experience is likely to be severely impaired unless Russia has cached copies of the entire Internet. so people can access, Knodel said. Even then, local Russian archiving will not reflect future content that is constantly being added to the global Internet.

“Virtually everyone in Russia who connects to the Internet will be affected, and there will be no effect on really powerful systemic institutions like the military and the government,” she said. “We know for a fact that this would seriously disrupt Internet access for people in Russia.

Heavy battle for Ukraine and unforeseen risks for the Russians

For Ukraine, forcing ICANN to comply is both a political and a technical issue.

ICANN – which means the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – is one of many global institutions that help guide and monitor the development of the Internet. It works largely by consensus and its members include not only governments but also civil society groups and technical experts.

For years, ICANN has carefully cultivated its role as an apolitical administrator of Internet functions. Due to its structure and decision-making process, there is no single participant in ICANN who dictates the results. This setting reflects the extremely complex ecosystem of companies and organizations that manage the technical infrastructure of the Internet.

Ukraine is facing a tough political battle over the number of groups it will have to convince. There are about a dozen vendors running so-called “root servers” that will need to be updated to remove Russia from the Internet, Stolz said, and a controversial plan like Ukraine’s will not lead to a consensus among them at ICANN. Even if ICANN somehow decides to implement Ukraine’s plan, it will only take one or two to get out, and the whole plan will fall apart.

Ukraine is also facing a technical struggle for some of the same reasons. The distributed nature of the Internet means that it must rely on everyone to agree.

“There is no internet center on a technical level,” Stolz said. “There’s no command center. There’s no button you can press to trigger all this stuff.”

Even if Ukraine directs everyone to the same page, it will still be a risky idea, Knodel said. The plan, she said, would violate some “really critical authentication and web security features” currently embedded in the Internet. This can be detrimental to Russians, who depend on these security features for their own safety, especially dissidents.

Russia and China are also actively building their own localized versions of the Internet that they can more easily control, Knodel said. Implementing Ukraine’s plan can simply give Russia what it wants: a more flexible Internet population that does not have access to foreign information.

“Russia has been trying for a long time to figure out how to disconnect from the larger Internet, and one of the main things keeping it from doing so is the global domain name system,” Knodel said.