If someone asked you, personally, to cut Russia off from the Internet, are you making a "decision" when you reply that you can't do it? No, of course you're not. It's simply something you don't have the authority/ability to do.

Same with ICANN here.

Then they should say they don't have the authority.

They've already told that:

>The globally agreed policies do not provide for ICANN to take unilateral action to disconnect these domains as you request.

Shouldn't be that hard to read a one-and-a-half page long document!

It was a reply to:

> I agree that this was the right move by ICANN.

Which turned out not to be a "move", really.

As they laid out, it's really not within their mandate nor the scope of their operations to do this anyways.

Responding and explaining that is really all they can do.

ICANN has covered all their bases here as most/all rules for TLDs don't really apply to ccTLDs or the governments that run them since they "own" the ccTLD. This is why http://ai./ exists, and the only thing ICAAN has in terms of guarantees for .ru is this agreement letter[0]. ICAAN specifically states at the end that, even without this agreement letter, ICAAN will continue to perform their duties to maintain the DNS system.

0: https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/icann-ru-letters...

How exactly does that ai. domain function? I have never seen a working URL formatted like that.

Quick note: the dot at the end is not necessary (at least not in Unix), it works without it in Safari/Firefox/Chrome plus some tools like dig/ping/traceroute. You can test: http://ai/ http://ai./

ai is a TLD, and domains technically all end in a "." - that is, you're reading this on news.ycombinator.com. , just nobody ever bothers writing the final dot.

I wonder why doesn't Google make a `https://google.` since they own that TLD.

under gTLD rules (the TLDs that private companies can buy/invest in), TLD operators cannot host any records outside of NS and RRSIG/other cryptographic record types, so they can't host email or webpages at the TLD itself. ccTLDs (country code) are effectively "owned" by the nation state themselves so ICANN generally doesn't impose too many rules on how they're used.

https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/new-gtld-dotl...

I believe the biggest issue is that it would have to be a non-SSL domain, unless Google figure out someone willing to sign a certificate for a that. But I also remember this being frowned upon by ICANN or some other entity in the past. Btw, the dot is not necessary (maybe it is in some OSs/browsers): http://ai/