Dropping support for the .ru top level domain

Patrick Bryant patrick at pbryant.com
Sat Mar 12 10:47:14 UTC 2022


I don't like the idea of disrupting any Internet service. But the current
situation is unprecedented.

The Achilles Heel of general public use of Internet services has always
been the functionality of DNS.

Unlike Layer 3 disruptions, dropping or disrupting support for the .ru TLD
can be accomplished without disrupting the Russian population's ability to
access information and services in the West.

The only countermeasure would be the distribution of Russian national DNS
zones to a multiplicity of individual DNS resolvers within Russia. Russian
operators are in fact implementing this countermeasure, but it is a slow
and arduous process, and it will entail many of the operational
difficulties that existed with distributing Host files, which DNS was
implemented to overcome.

The .ru TLD could be globally disrupted by dropping the .ru zone from the
13 DNS root servers. This would be the most effective action, but would
require an authoritative consensus. One level down in DNS delegation are
the 5 authoritative servers. I will leave it to the imagination of others
to envision what action that could be taken there...

ru      nameserver = a.dns.ripn.net
ru      nameserver = b.dns.ripn.net
ru      nameserver = d.dns.ripn.net
ru      nameserver = e.dns.ripn.net
ru      nameserver = f.dns.ripn.net

The impact of any action would take time (days) to propagate.
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