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[Russia] Web Hosting, Domain Registration, Domain Sales, exempted from US Sanctions!!
Update A variety of internet technologies, including web hosting and domain name registration services, have been declared exempt from US sanctions on Russia.
The Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has issued notice (pdf) specifically authorizing the export to Russia for the following:
services, software, hardware, or technology incident to the exchange of communications over the internet, such as instant messaging, videoconferencing, chat and email, social networking, sharing of photos, movies, and documents, web browsing, blogging, web hosting, and domain name registration services
Link to official notice (pdf file)
Comments
Because the US rightfully recognized that trying to control elements of globalization, such as the internet, in the name of punishing another country would lead to the collapse of globalization; ultimately making it easier for countries to engage in zero sum games.
Yeah, even ICANN earlier in March notified that they'll not ban the .RU domain space. Internet domains/hosting have nothing to do with the war, except sites spreading false/fake propaganda from both sides, which needs to be banned.
Damn and yesterday I had to top-up 5sim sms service via crypto rather than using my CC (CC conversion to ruble got declined on Unitpay, Payoneer, Stripe and their other cc processors). Then again, I wonder if this kind of "service" falls under the updated regulation.
it might take few days for companies to re-instate the services, mostly, the financial ones, if they are out of the sanction notification. It's not clear how this will go. Because, purchasing hosting/domain requires to go through visa/mastercard/cc and banking institutions which are now sanctioned. So it's still not clear.
ICANN's decision is slightly different, in that Ukraine asking them to take decisions on matters relating to Russia, is essentially illegal.
My point here is a bit different. The reason for peace in our modern age (except for the current Ukraine-Russia war) is because countries cooperate with each other, making countries with very different ideologies effectively behave like "allies".
If a country can become rich by providing goods and services to others, that's vastly more preferable over waging wars whose outcome could swing either way. As an example, both China and US may want to engage against a war against each other. But, if American companies can build stuff for cheap in China and the Chinese can improve their own economy by getting American businesses to invest in their country, it's easier to not wage war and simply focus on how to get economic growth out of the mutual cooperation that's in place.
The internet plays an important role in globalization, bringing yet another thing which countries can cooperate around - such as streaming, hosting or social media services.
Messing around with the internet through sanctions would undermine this role and might just cause other countries to think about creating their own walled internet, like the "intranet" in North Korea. This would be a huge blow to globalization and once cooperation between countries has been reduced, it's far easier for ideologically opposed countries to want to go to war because there's "nothing to lose", so to speak.
(Of course human lives are lost in war, but each country views the killing of people in other countries as a very noble act.)
I would add that globalization works in favour of the rich and powerful. It's more efficient than waging wars and/or conquering colonies (not even to mention the PR side of things).
The way you've described it - it sounds like a win-win deal. In many (most?) cases, I think it's not a win-win, nor is it an open and fair (market) competition.
ICANN does and will protect the interests of big capital - mostly and primarily. Another sprocket in the well-oiled machine.
War works in the favour of the rich and powerful too. You wouldn't find the president in the battlefield, it's always common people who're either being killed or being conscripted to partake in a war.
The point that you bring up is that the "rich and powerful" seems to be a more general problem of hierarchical organization; societies typically value people who can provide strategic input over those who put in labor, which ends up creating a hierarchy. This applies to both socialism and capitalism; in socialism it's a pointing out the hierarchical organization in corporations and criticizing its disadvantages; in capitalism it's the other way round.
Answering the question of why societies prefer strategic input over labor is hard. The obvious solution may be to remove hierarchies in society, and yet decentralized power has its own problems (anarchy, distributed webs of power, and the likes). You'll also find that it's easy to find a dedicated employee but extremely difficult to find a good manager or a business/political leader, one who can really take into account the nuanced nature and varying interests of people involved in a business/society and navigate effectively around these problems.
It's like arguing democracy doesn't work - no system is perfect. However, countries would always try to improve their quality of life and it's vastly preferable for that to happen via positive sum games. Without that, the question to "how do we make our country better" is always, "there's that neighboring country with a lucrative resource (agricultural climate, mineral resources), so let's go get that". There's a reason wars take up a large section of any resource on human history.
I'm quite curious about how you can have that take on an organization whose only job is to only coordinate which countries get to put which set of numbers on the source field of IP datagrams, and which domain names are controlled by which country.
I also find their justification in rejecting the Ukranian request quite reasonable, see https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/marby-to-fedorov-02mar22-en.pdf:
Now, you could easily argue that ICANN is somehow trying to protect [insert your enemies here], but then they have to decide which set of values are "right" and "wrong", which makes sense if you're a political party, but not so much if you're a organization just trying to coordinate technical functions of a global system.
ineed!