The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has rejected Ukraine's call to isolate Russia from the global Internet.
Following the invasion by Russian forces, Ukraine's ICANN representative requested that the top-level domains and their associated Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates be revoked and that the web hosting services be removed.
However, ICANN says it cannot do that, and even if it could, it would not, because such actions are not part of the company's mission.
No actor can turn off the Internet.
The news was confirmed in a letter that ICANN CEO Göran Marby sent to Ukrainian officials.
"As you know, the Internet is a decentralized system. No single actor has the ability to control or shut it down," wrote ICANN CEO Göran Marby.
Although Marby said the situation Ukraine found itself in was "terrible," he added that ICANN's mission "does not extend to taking punitive action, issuing sanctions, or restricting access to segments of the Internet, regardless of provocations."
"Essentially," he added, "ICANN was designed to keep the Internet working, not for its coordination function to be used to stop it from working."
The request came from Andrii Nabok, ICANN Representative in Ukraine, and Mykhailo Fedorov, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Digital Transformation of Ukraine, and requested the removal of the .ru, .рф, and .su TLDs.
They also asked ICANN to shut down DNS root servers located in the Russian Federation, namely St. Petersburg, UK (IPv4 199.7.83.42) and Moscow, UK (IPv4 199.7.83.42, 3 instances).
"Russia uses its weapon to attack civilian infrastructure such as residential apartments, kindergartens, hospitals," the letter said.
“These heinous crimes were made possible primarily by the Russian propaganda machine using websites that continually spread disinformation, hate speech, promote violence and hide the truth about the war in Ukraine. Ukraine's IT infrastructure has suffered numerous attacks from Russia, hampering the ability of citizens and the government to communicate.
The two politicians also asked the RIPE NCC to withdraw the right to use all IPv4 and IPv6 addresses from all Russian members of the RIPE NCC and to block the DNS root servers it operates.
By: CNN