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See Ya .su
Sarkastro writes "Wired has this story on the pending death of the .su domain. Since the Soviet Union broke up a decade ago, all of the former members now have their own ccTLDs. Now, some people are ready to see .su be put to rest, including ICANN who is quite firm in their stance. Others within the former Soviet Union would like to see it stick around as a geopgraphical area domain. Currently, .su domains cost $15,000 (.ru cost less than $30), so there are only about 28,000 registered. It's especially interesting to watch how the Internet reacts to geographical boundaries that no longer exist. It's easy to add a ccTLD, but much much harder to remove one."
The whole system of TLDs is meaningless when an organization can get .com, a company can register .org and .net no longer has any connection with ISPs. Once you add country-specific domains it gets even more futile (aol.co.uk or uk.aol.com or aol-uk.net, or aoluk.cx, or...).
.int domain for organizations like the UN, EU, etc. But AFAIK this is not open to the public.)
So why not. Why not add geographical area domains as another supposed convention which nobody takes any notice of. It'll bring in more revenue for the registrars, and perhaps help relieve the artificial scarcity of the existing TLDs. In fact, any two-letter combination should be a legal TLD.
(FWIW there is the
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I'd be pretty pissed if someone took away my $20 domain. I can't imagine what I'd do if someone took away a domain I just paid 15 grand for just because a few people in ICANN think .su should be obsolete.
Many countries are going to change their names in the future. The article doesn't really go into it, but I'm sure the name has some political overtones for many people in Russia. Some other names with political ramifications are .tw (taiwan) .cs (Czechoslovakia) .kp and .kr (Koreas) etc.
Maybe we should move to something more flexible.
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dave
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
Danny.
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The pending death ( or not ) of the .su domain is yet anothe demonstration of the stupidity of ICANN.
The best policy is to let it stay around. And to add more TLDs to the list. If they need rules, they could have two letters for countries and geographic areas. Three letters ( or more ) for anything else.
All ICANN should do, is set the technical standards for setting up a TLD, and then letting anybody who meets them, setup the TLD, and maintain the root servers for that TLD. It just might mean that domain names are meaningful --- especially if the TLD granter enforces the naming policies of that TDL. [ .org would only be for non-profit organizations, as one example. ]
The register of the .su TLD does have one thing more or less right --- only trademarks can be registered. [ I think it should also allow the name of the organization, or its initials. Granted, that will eliminate personal webpages with a domain of their own. ( free.tibet comes to mind. ( and yes that is the correct URL for that page. ) ) Allowing cities or states as the second level should also be permissible. I'm not sure I want things the way the .us domain was originally setup yourname.yourcity.yourstate.us, but it has some advantages. http://www.symphony.seattle.wa.us is a lot easier to remember than whatever the Seattle Symphony uses for their website. http://symphony.renton.wa.us is much easier to remember than whatever they use --- which isn't listed on google either. :-(
What's wrong with both Geographical and national cc's? Geek thinking tends to try to make it all "make sense" by conforming to a pattern or rule, but why? It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to work.
It's a bad idea to keep .su as a name of a geographic region. The Soviet Union is not a geographic region; it never was one. As I look at the map above my head, I see the 15 nations that were created from the USSR. The former SSRs have ccTLDs now. Let's place the .su TLD in a museum with all the other dated relics.
Support the Chagossians
Is there some other entity *wanting* the .su top-level particularly badly (I didn't see anything in the article telling me one way or the other)?
.su and raise the maintainence fees accordingly so that it dies out naturally. When it reaches zero domains (or close enough to zero for government work) nix the top-level domain. ICANN gets money, the die-hards get continued use of the domain. Problem solved right?
They should stop allowing new registrations within
Oh, brother.
.xxx TLD and then make international agreements to force porn to be in .xxx, there's going to be more classification arguments than we can possibly imagine.
.co.uk, you don't have to worry about trademark conflicts, because the country already has an excellent, dispute-resolved database to work from, and simply applies that system to their name granting system.
This isn't just *DNS*, it's the standardized ISO country code system. It's always hard to change, it doesn't change easily, etc.
You want some good reasons to use the current system? Okay, let's go.
A) Politics. Not just a joke any more. A lot of "countries" want legitimacy (or to remove legitimacy) by getting a TLD, and political pressure has been placed on ICANN before. ICANN solved this by passing the buck onto ISO, and saying that they don't deal with political problems -- that they use only ISO country codes for regions. Unless you want Israel or Palestine bombing ICANN members, this is worth considering.
B) Stability. A naming system that fluxes constantly is *much* less useful. The idea is that IPs can change, the underlying network can move around, but names stay the same. If you move to *anything* that's easier to change, you reduce the usefulness of the naming system to end users.
C) Inherent data within the naming system. With a few annoying exceptions, you can tell where something is based just by glancing at its domain name. Now, before people start on the usual 'Net dogma "the Internet erases all boundaries and obsoletes nationalities", let me point out that we still happen to exist in the real world as well, for the time being. There's a fairly useful correlation between country name and physical distance (esp. since most educated people can tell roughly how far it is from their country to another). Unless network technology gets drastically different, this has a pretty major relationship to latency, bandwidth, *and* network cost (i.e. you're supposed to use mirrors within your own country, and it's pretty easy to tell where they are if you just glance at the TLD on the mirrors). Second, like it or not, different countries have different laws and censorship rules as relate to the Internet. If I can easily tell that a site is in China, I can figure out whether the government's likely to have sanitized the information on it.
D) It's *a* clear solution. The good thing about the current system is that there aren't quibbles. "Well, *maybe* ISO really meant *this* when they assigned the country codes" doesn't come up. If people start trying to build a
E) Trademark issues. There's a fairly clear (and, I think, reasonable) advantage to Microsoft in not letting Apple grab "microsoft.com" and redirect it to a fake site that gives people a bad impression of Microsoft. Countries already have their own trademark rules and registries set up, with a legal system in place to avoid conflicts. If you register things in
F) Potential for an alternative. DNS isn't bound into the Internet at an architectural level, though it is quite popular. It's quite replaceable by people that want to set up their own system. If you want a non-hierarchical system, without domains (i.e. keywords), *go* for it. Set up a couple of servers, a registrar, hand out patches for Mozilla and IE, and you're good to go. Just don't try to turn the *Domain* Name System into your *Keyword* Name System. If someone wanted to set up a naming system based on GPS coordinates, they could do it if they wanted to.
May we never see th
Because DNS is hierarchical.
You don't like it, for the love of God, don't try to make everyone else unhappy with DNS. Set up your own "keyword" server, add a patch to Moz and IE, and let people use *that* naming system.
If that's what people really want, people will use it.
May we never see th
While you were modded funny, I think that's going to be a problem at some point of time in the future. I guess that could be solved the same way they did with the Net of today when it expanded outside the USA; while "American" entities have TLDs like
Umm, but even later we have to add TLDs of
Start making decisions about whether to recognize domains and you will find it very difficult to stop.
Last I checked the US Congress were not considered in particularly high regard within the US, as a body they are particularly prone to posturing and political pandering. So one can attack the Congress without attacking the US people just as one can consider the fool in the Whitehouse a crook who bilked the investors in Harken without attacking the US.
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http://save.nsk.su/english/vote/index.html
.SU destruction. From the marketing point of view (which - by all means - should determine the technical point of view with the users' interests and not the other way around) existence of .SU is fully justified. We don't agree with the attitude of those people who say that we will not be harmed by .SU destruction. On this market every solution is possible if it is demanded by users just like different watches or briefcases ranging in price from $1 to $15000 and more for an item. This is rather a question of personal preferences and habits of every one. No internet user should become a hostage of some administrative and political games of separate individuals who traditionally were closer than many regular users to the decision-making Internet organizations.
We as users stay out of arguments about technical issues that play for