Hello Timo, I think your concerns should not be left unanswered. While less likely that RIPE itself will be affected, it is not impossible. They delegate IP space for Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Palestine, Iran and such. Managing this for such (political) conflict zones does come with legal risk. Ideally RIR's should be able to carry out their work regardless of sanctions. But that is a political question about an infrastructure's legal immunity. And a technical workgroup is perhaps not the best place to answer that... (Unless someone here is also from RIPE's legal team?) Organizations like the one you mentioned should take care choosing a TLD. The ccTLD of one's own country usually only answers to the local laws. And if they do apply sanctions, you will likely have legal options available. For decentralization's sake, i make the suggestion to move one of the three main TLD's (.net, .com, .org) under Europa's management. This might distribute and improve legal stability of the DNS ecosystem. (And if this is not possible, that is indicative of a problem with DNS!) Does anyone of the WG have opinions over this? Sincerely, Named T. Relay On Monday, September 14th, 2026 at 1:01 AM, Timo Hilbrink via dns-wg <dns-wg@ripe.net> wrote:
Hi all,
As we all know, the DNS infrastructure has been built to be decentralised and resilient, so that its functionality does not depend on a single continent, country or government. But what if your gTLD domain name can be wiped out of the DNS by a single government?
This is exactly what happened to Autistici/Inventati (A/I), an Italian non-profit, volunteer-run service provider that caters to hundreds of activist groups around the world. They have operated using the autistici.org domain name for the past 25 years.
On August 26, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) at the US Department of the Treasury included them in their list of “Specially Designated Global Terrorists” (SDGT). On August 28, PIR, the US headquartered registry operator for the .org TLD, placed autistici.org on status severHold, effectively wiping it from the DNS.
This all happened without A/I committing any crime, neither in Italy nor in the US, and without any prosecutor ever indicting them either for felonies or misdemeanors. Simply the fact they provided services to certain activist groups that may be labeled as controversial or extremist by some authorities, was enough to place the whole provider on the SDGT list.
In this case it was PIR (created by ISOC) that acted on the sanctions imposed by OFAC, although PIR still hasn't officially released any statement about this. A lot of organisations with an .org domain name are now very concerned about the future of their domains, but .org is not the only large gTLD that is run by a US based registry operator, both .net and .com are operated by Verisign, which is also headquartered in the US. So we can not rule out that something similar could happen to other domains.
As an example: Just over two weeks ago, the US Department of the Treasury has begun "Operation Economic Outcast: an unprecedented, whole-of-government, economic campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran and its enablers. The Treasury is significantly expanding sanctions risk for those who continue to choose to do business with Iran."
What if RIPE NCC would be classified as an organisation that provides services to sanctioned entities, could that mean that ripe.net gets put on serverHold?
Should we still depend so heavily on US based gTLD registry operators?
For more background on the A/I case, see: https://www.article19.org/resources/usa-terrorism-designation-has-global-con... https://keepitfree.ai/ https://www.inventati.org/
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