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."

Comments

$15'000 for a domain?

[odt]

is that really $ or rubles?

.ux

[Anonymous Coward]

Im suprised .ux is not a tld www.lin.ux www.tu.x www.s.ux www.hp.ux

Insane Price

[bellings]

Currently, .su domains cost $15,000 (.ru cost less than $30), so there are only about 28,000 registered.

That sentence is simply insane. $15,000 dollars per domain times 28,000 domains is nearly a half billion dollars. I simply can't imagine anyone buying even one of the oh-so-valuable .su domains for $15,000, much less any economy absorbing a half billion dollars worth of them.

What is the real story on the price? How much have most people really paid for their .su domains, and who got all the cash?

stable URLs?

[captaineo]

I thought URLs were supposed to be permanently stable! Shutting down a TLD does not exactly help this out...

I admit I've broken a couple minor links on my own sites, but I do try very very hard to keep old URLs working...

Re:It's going to keep happening.

[Anonymous Coward]

why not get ride of country specific domains and just have more divisions at the next level??

Re:Keeping .su as an area?

[Zeinfeld]

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.

No, it just does not fit into the stupid boxes that the mindles beuraucrats try to fit them in.

The issue that people seem to be missing is backwards compatibility here. Turning off .su breaks stuff. Leaving .su on breaks nothing. So .su should not be turned off unless there is a really really good reason.

The fact that .su is no longer arround does not count. The country code is still assigned by ISO. The relevant RFC states that the assignment of the iso code is all that is relevant. Postel did that on purpose so that IANA did not need to get into stupid disputes on what was and what was not a state.

If ICANN goes this road there is a major risk of fracturing the root. Nobody much gives a hang about .su but if this move succeeds it will be used as a precedent to remove .pl which given that ICANN is far from isolated from the pro-Likud US Congress means that pragmatism is unlikely to prevail.

There are certain to be protests over any US move to throw .pl out of the root. It is exactly the type of thing that the EU are concerned about - the US using the root as an extension of its recent bugger-everyone-else foreign policy. After .pl expect .cu to be next on the list as a sop to the Miami keep-Elian-from-his dad vote.

In summary, ICANN if they had a political clue will not open up this can of worms. They will only create a precedent that can only be damaging in the long run and insert themselves directly into the international equivalent of the US abortion debate.

Re:cheapest domain name?

[Thowllly]

Actually, .tk domain names are not free. I registered a .tk domain name some time ago, that pointed to my (never visited by anyone except myself) homepage. The name I selected was totally nonsense, yet a month or two later I received a latter stating that my domain name had been requested by lots of people and I would have to pay too keep the domain name.

Bait and switch.

Re:Quit bashing DNS. It's your friend.

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

" With a few annoying exceptions, you can tell where something is based just by glancing at its domain name."

Some examples of the exceptions:
- That whole "dot tv" bullshit. I'd say atleast half of the people with .tv dont even know where tuvalu is.
- .tk's are free for anyone, anywhere, again.. and i doubt their users can even pronounce Tokelau (note: to save you all some time, they only give redirects, its not that great.)

- and most other domains also let you register without actually being there or in any way being related to that location. see irc server in my username/sig.

Re:Quit bashing DNS. It's your friend.

[Lars T.]

Speaking of .tv - what happens to that TLD should Tuvalu actually sinks into the ocean?

Not the 1st time

[thogard]

.oz was removed years ago. What used to live there moved to oz.au.

Someone dropped the ball here.

[welshsocialist]

On 21 December 1991, the USSR broke up. Four days later, Gorbachev resigned as Soviet President. Any new registrations for .su should have been frozen. People who had an .su domain should have been given three choices:

A. Closing out their .su domain.
B. Transferring their name to another ccTLD in the world;
C. Transferring their name to one of the new Republics ccTLDs once they were set up;

After that was done, the .su ccTLD should have died in 1991-92 and not in 2002, a full ten years after the events happened.