Dear Mr. President,
I urge your attention to a massive crackdown on the .by domain zone launched by Belarus authorities:
On May 18th, the websites and services of the major independent internet media TUT.BY went offline, as the access to its website was blocked. Tut.by has 3,303 million active users and country coverage of 62,58% (Gemius, 2019) compared to the overall population of 9,35 million people.
The offices of hoster.by, which is the largest registrar for .BY, were raided by the financial police, too.
Recently, the so-called authorities have also blocked access to probono.by - the website where repressed Belarusians can get help.
Numerous prominent websites managed by Tut.by, including email service mail.tut.by, a platform for charity donations help.blog.tut.by and an affiliated tam.by are blocked at the datacenter level, as they remain unreachable for users from Belarus as well as from abroad.
This couldn't have happened without the OAC's (Operations and Analysis Center, the TLD registry operator) approval.
All businesses in Belarus that provide services with the use of Internet must place their websites on Belarusian servers and use Belarusian hosting.
This allows the authorities to silence any dissenting voices. And this practice is widely used: between August and November 2020, more than 70 resources were blocked, mostly media and VPN services. https://baj.by/be/analytics/blokirovka-saytov-pravovye-instrumenty
Such an arbitrary internet blocking violates the freedom of speech and the right to access information, which is a dire violation of Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Therefore, I urge you to deprive OAC of its status as a TLD registry operator. I believe the organization belonging to a dictator and promoting censorship must not have the right to manage a BY root domain zone.
Instagram/ @ania_redko_ https://www.instagram.com/p/CPDJQKBJmje/