Welcome to the Internet Sanctions Project

This is an open, Internet community governed, project which produces real-time BGP and RPZ data feeds of network resources (IP addresses, Autonomous System numbers, and domain names) associated with sanctioned entities. These data feeds facilitate Internet network operators in complying with governmentally-mandated sanctions against violators of international and human rights law.

Why does this project exist?

National governments have used sanctions as a deescalatory punitive measure for thousands of years. The private sector within each nation is responsible for enacting sanctions defined by their government. This has historically worked well with banking, since banks (which may superficially appear to be multinational) are actually collections of individual, autonomous, independently-regulated entities, each existing within a single country, though they share a common brand. But the "flat" global, transnational nature of the Internet makes compliance with diverse sanctions regimes much more difficult for Internet organizations. Large Internet networks operate as single networks spanning the world, with unitary policy and technical choices implemented globally. Thus a policy imposed by a single government on a global network, if implemented, has extraterritorial effects in every other country, violating their Westphalian rights of self-determination. And conflicting policies imposed by different governments cannot be resolved without breaking the fundamental nature of Internet connectivity.

At the same time, broadly-defined Internet sanctions tend to disproportionately affect the civilian population of sanctioned countries; this is both counterproductive and violates their human rights to freedom of communication and access to information as recognized by the United Nations, the European Union, the Council of Europe, the Organization of American States, the African Union, and others. This project brings together governments, Internet organizations, civil society, and academia to provide a globally-harmonized Internet sanctions imposition mechanism that combines the expertise and perspectives from different stakeholders to develop proportional and effective sanctions that aim to not impinge upon civilians' access to information and communications. This project is neither pro-sanction nor anti-sanction; it exists to facilitate public-sector/private-sector coordination while ensuring that the human rights of civilians are protected.

Origin of the project

This project originated in an open letter from leaders of the multistakeholder Internet governance community, calling for constructive dialog about the imposition of Internet-related sanctions, and for a principled, structured, and transparent approach to sanctions, with the explicit aim of maintaining connectivity to civilian populations and responding against those who minimize this.

Structure

The project is implemented by five working groups:

• A policy group monitors the political situation and the sanction initiatives of national governments, and evaluates whether a situation or proposed sanctions is relevant in light of the project's principles. If a sanction is deemed in-scope, the policy group defines the situation and (potentially) sanctioned entities and passes them to the OSINT group. The policy group is responsible for determining the limited scope of measures, analyzing when existing sanctions should be repealed, and for liaising with governments which are considering declaring this mechanism to be sufficient compliance with their nationally-defined sanctions.

• An intelligence group investigates and catalogs the Internet resources (IP addresses, Autonomous System numbers, and domain names) held by sanctioned entities. This helps the policy group understand the (potential) impact of measures and assess their proportionality.

• An oversight board provides a final check on which resources are included in the blocking feed, verifying its conformity with international and human rights law. When anything is added to the feed, an announcement will be posted to the (read-only) announcement email list, which you're welcome to subscribe to, to keep track of the project's outcomes.

• An operations group keeps the BGP and RPZ feed publishing mechanisms working and gather feedback from implementers.

• A research group is responsible for metrics and monitoring of the system and its effectiveness, and liaise with the academic community.

Participation

This is a community volunteer effort, and your participation is welcome! Please consider reading the FAQ and subscribing to the email discussion lists as starting-points.