What happened to .AF?

When the US withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, Digital Medusa published a trilogy about the potential scenarios that could happen to Afghanistan’s Internet infrastructure. We have been monitoring  the situation since then and it look like some issues impacting .AF are evolving. 

Background

Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) are assigned to each country or territory if they are listed in International Standards Organization (ISO) standard, ISO 3166. The ccTLD of Afghanistan is .AF. Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and its affiliate Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) make sure operationally the ccTLDs are secure and stable. These organizations historically have been in charge of reflecting delegation and redelegation (control of who operates the ccTLD) of the ccTLDs, in the root zone.   

In 2021, we discussed the fate of .AF and argued that ICANN has traditionally maintained a neutral role in delegation and redelegation, and it normally does not adjudicate directly when there is a conflict or a government change. It prefers to rely on decisions made by local actors. IANA resolutions that declare the delegation or redelegation of a ccTLD are generally rubber-stamping local decisions. IANA has a standard process for this, documented at this link. It does have certain requirements that might not be purely technical (for example, it requires multi-stakeholder support for the redelegation), but it does not proactively negotiate with the parties or facilitate the redelegation. Sometimes if it cannot evaluate the multistakeholder local support, it still goes ahead with the approval of the delegation. 

Over the years, the operators of ccTLDs ensured this neutrality and hands-off approach so that ICANN and its Government Advisory Committee would not get too involved in delegation and redelegation decisions. Given that the Afghan Ministry of Communications and IT runs the .AF registry, if the Taliban takes over the ministry of communications, there is a possibility that they will thereby receive control of .AF.”

The prediction that the Taliban could take over the Ministry of communications and IT and receive control of .AF came true. However, the ccTLD operator contact point has not changed. So, no redelegation happened, but the control of the ccTLD from the previous ministry was transferred to the Taliban-led ministry. 

Sanctions

The Afghanistan Communications and IT Ministry is led by a person who is on sanction lists of multiple countries and the United Nations (including Australia and  the EU). The person does not seem to be on the US-OFAC list of sanctioned individuals . Since ICANN, a US entity, is in charge, they probably do not need to get  a specific OFAC license to keep .AF in the root zone. However, if the person is on the OFAC list in the future, it is likely that ICANN would be required to get a license. 

QUEER.AF case

In 2023, there was some anecdotal evidence that foreign-based registrars could not pay the .AF registry because of economic sanctions. The scale of the issue was not clear until a few weeks ago when QUEER.AF publicly announced that the Ministry of Communications and IT had communicated to them that their domain would be removed from the registry file zone. Gandi was the registrar for the .AF and has since stopped registering, transferring, renewing and restoring .AF names. The reason later on turned out to be that registrars owe some money to the sanctioned Ministry of Communications and IT and cannot transfer the money. 

Interesting case for Mastodon and other distributed social media networks

Since QUEER.AF was a Mastodon instance, it reveals how the governance of registries and registrars and even political conflicts could make these instances unstable. It could also bring about a host of trust and safety and freedom of speech issues. Additionally, distributed social networks governance measures could create stability problems. For example, security policies that take away the admin’s control to change the domain could hamper the freedom to maintain the instance if the domain has to change. 

Another problem is that registering domains that end with ccTLDs could be even more problematic. Some ccTLDs are in search of imposing their local values which can go against universal human rights and be entangled with cultural relativism and political problems. All these issues will affect accessibility of these domain names and their presence on distributed networks. We could perhaps argue that those ccTLDs that create non-discriminatory and human rights abiding policies might become  more popular among these instances. 

A cautionary tale for foreign registrants of other ccTLDs?

Some ccTLDs  have rules around residency and citizenship. Also the policies of a ccTLD can be changed at the whim of a government or an operator in a country where the rule of law is weak. 

There is a very popular ccTLD registry, .AI that for now has relaxed policies for registration. But it could change its residency policy at any time and suspend or de-register domain names of foreign registrants.

Localization, localization, localization 

ccTLDs sometimes on purpose want to be the image of their own local culture and government. Some academics even argue that ccTLDs should be run by the government for the government. Unfortunately, the government control of ccTLD in Afghanistan could create problems for Afghanistan Internet development. NIC.AF theoretically could have spent the registration fee on Internet development (many ccTLDs do) but it cannot. And seems like for .AF to operate only local  registrars can get involved with the sale of .AF. 

Overall, this transition of control is not in favor of .AF’s development, prosperity and success.