Ukraine asks ICANN to revoke Russian domains and shut down DNS root servers | Hacker News Reader

Ukraine asks ICANN to revoke Russian domains and shut down DNS root servers

arstechnica.com

10 pointsDiabloD36 comments

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The approximate way I've been thinking about decisions like this so far is:

- Shutting down the means for people to communicate is not OK

- Deciding to be selective about who you do business with is OK

The former seems to affect indiscriminate groups; the latter is about personal agency.

Where are the gaps/limitations in my thinking there and what are some other situations or guidelines worth considering?

More generally, we also need to see at what keeps the "internet" a global network.

Many people have already been uneasy about the dominance of the US over key internet infrastructures. If ICANN decides to do what Ukraine has asked then IMHO they will lose all trust and legitimacy, resulting in global fragmentation because the reasonable course of action for every country will then be to control as much as they can themselves.

In the same way, what has happened with SWIFT will also precipitate the emergence of alternative systems and justifies that e.g. China has already developed its own.

There are several key infrastructures that are basically 'global utilities' these days and that should remain neutral otherwise everyone will go back to building its own stuff ringfenced from others. On the other hand it was expected that these key 'global utilities' would be weaponised since they are usually effectively controlled by "the West" (and that explains why China is trying to either change that control structure or build alternative systems).

The hysteria in attempting to harm Russia in all ways possible is just more of the mob mentality of cancel culture. People need to remember that there are many innocent people involved on all sides of this issue.

One Ukrainian government official writing a letter to ICANN isn't cancel culture, nor hysteria or mob mentality. They have the same rationale that much of Hacker News has claiming social media must be regulated or made illegal because it spreads too much disinformation and propaganda.

I think they're wrong, and ICANN will probably refuse, but the tendency nowadays to conflate everything into cancel culture is just getting absurd.

Cancel culture is definitely a reality, but is mostly concentrated in the various social media forums available. It is human nature to want to be on the team that is correct or winning, not unlike rabid fans of a sports team. Because of that, people tend to do and say things before rationally thinking things through, and I have witmessed here on HN also.

My point was not necessarily this issue, but all things regarding Russia, or the crisis/issue du jour.

(self-reply; speaking out loud here, basically, while thinking about this more)

If businesses that operate communications services are considering shutting down in Belarus/Russia in protest, perhaps something akin to "data rationing" (limited hours per day, for example) could be a way to achieve much of the intended effect without all of the potential negative externalities.

Most communications services should have their own in-band ways to communicate with their users, and so they should be able to communicate any planned limitations days/weeks in advance (in order to reduce the likelihood of outages causing unnecessary surprises and/or difficulties).

This would allow families and peers to continue to communicate, while demonstrating a lack of support for the actions of leadership that have created the circumstances in the first place. It's a different model to that of nations enacting rations within their own borders; this would be a form of communication/data rationing-as-protest.

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