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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."
is that really $ or rubles?
assuming you can have single letter domain names X.org i.am
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
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
What justification do they have for that exorbitant price tag?
Voodoo Girl is the bomb!
The .eu domain name is currently in the process of being created by the European Union: see The Registers story and the EU's own poorly formatted paper about the issue.
In a bid to protect new domains from cybersquatters, the FID set a $15,000 price tag on registering a dot-su domain.
If you're a cybersquatter such as Microsoft or PETA, price isn't a problem, now is it?
Now, there's the matter of actually wanting a domain like that. I don't even think either of them are capable of such wasteful spending... then again...
Okay, I'm going to sleep. Having no sleep is hazardous to your health, and causes you to make posts like this one.
Danish != nationality
it's $1,000: http://www.nic.ru/en/index.html
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.
Ju-jit.sus u
diahat.su
goat.su
stfu.su
my-betty.
15000-is-way-too-much-for.su
ugh.. need sleep
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.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I thought this was obvious? ;-)
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
If they succeed in keeping .ru, I'd like to get the .we ccTLD for Pangea (for Whole Earth). It broke up a lot longer ago than the Soviet Union.
www.bannination.com Two things float to the top he
Currently, .su domains cost $15,000 (.ru cost less than $30), so there are only about 28,000 registered.
.su domains for $15,000, much less any economy absorbing a half billion dollars worth of them.
.su domains, and who got all the cash?
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
What is the real story on the price? How much have most people really paid for their
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
The island of tokelau gives away .tk domain names (kinda, you use their DNS). It's a small island and has no net access.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
.tk is free. You can get yours at www.tk (courtesy of the tiny island of Tokelau)
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...
If they decide to take away .su, you could always sue. http://www.lawyers.su ;)
Assign them to Teacher's Pets, high ranking corporate and political subordinates, Slashdot Karma Whores, and other such people. Reason?
.s(uck)u(p)
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
cheers
dave
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
Nah, I just want our true TLD's to get brought out.. you know, .earth .moon .mars =)
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
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. :-(
True that .su doesn't have many known web sited. The problem is that ons of working e-mail addresses will be doomed. E.g. my father has an e-mail which has not changed as of 1994. Hundreds, if not thousands of people know it and there's no way to track whom to notify of change. For him, removing .su woud be a DISASTER. Hope it will never happen
There is also a plan afoot to drop the .net.uk second level domain by Christmas. Strong objections have been raised, but Nominet may not listen. It is scary to think that one's online identity (be it .su or .net.uk or something else) could be pulled out from under you. IMHO, if upper-level domains are to be scrapped, the existing ones should be grandfathered.
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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.
http://europa.eu.int/ , .int being ."international"
.eu domain is going through european parliament at the moment, most people think it's a great idea, and they're taking the time to do it properly, apparently with ICANN cooperating!
.eu, rather than separating .gov.eu, .com.eu, .org.eu, etc.
.int suffix.
The
No mention yet of splitting this domain: looks like it will remain
Prices expected to be on the high side (£60+ per year?), indicating that it's aimed at large organisations. Presumably european politics will stay inside europa.eu, once it loses its
the EU's own poorly formatted paper
o lt ldswhentheycantevenputparagraphmarksintheirdocumen ts...
Yeahthatshorriblewhatmakesthemthinktheycancontr
someoneshouldsendthemalamenessfilteremail
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
My name is Yuri.
.su domains here in the ligoroursly disposed U.S.S.R as yous in West part like to say, it is C.C.R.
.su!
I ams Top Level Directorate of
Asks us and thinks us we are bad yet unrepentant Political Party in Russia that gathers steams in large bushels.
We are Voice of The Peoples.
To say that we have no longer a voices in top leveled domains is propaganda. We are the largest party of politics in Russia. Powerful and forceful. With clouts. We have!
We be shall returning to the International Arena with forces and large clout given to us by the Land of The Mother.
By Stalin! We shall retake Leningrad and
All U R Ship R Belong to Us.
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.
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that, once reunited, the Soviet Union might hire a bunch of lawyers and su ? ;)
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
.MS is actually in use by the caribbean country Montserrat [2], according to http://www.ms/names.htm and nic.ms. You can get a domain for US$50 a year, but microsoft.ms is already registred by Virtualley InterWarez.Services GmbH. ;-)
Because host names without a dot are reserved for the local network.
Because DNS actually has some meaning to its syntax. It's not just a slightly different looking set of "AOL keywords" with periods inconveniently placed in it.
Now, I'd be all for another naming system if people really want another one (and I'm *sure* nothing would make MS happier than controlling their own naming system...like a global Active Directory or something), but can people stop trying to mangle DNS? It's been a nice, (relatively) straightforward system for years.
".biz". Argh. Fucking registrars.
May we never see th
Exactly! That's what bugged me about the main post. The USSR was never a purely geographical region, it was a political entity. Why not change the .be domain to reflect the former British empire? Because it's gone and no longer relevant. All of the individual components are well-represented and there is no advantage gained by grouping them.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Funny I would say these were the most invalid. Chechnia has a government and Palestine has an international recognized one.
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.
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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
" With a few annoying exceptions, you can tell where something is based just by glancing at its domain name."
.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.)
Some examples of the exceptions:
- That whole "dot tv" bullshit. I'd say atleast half of the people with
-
- 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.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Well, aside from there being a river of political bloodshed behind the name, it also has distinct colonial overtones for many in the now independent countries. The reason for having a european union domain or other organization is there are shared traits that people want to highlight. Who wants to highlight a history of political oppression and colonialism? Should India and the UK and the rest of the commonwealth states share a geographical .BE (british empire) domain? Would the US be included or not?
Actually, here's one relevant difference, ownership. In essence most domains are leased, reverting back to the issuing authority after a year or two. .ro is one exception. You register once, you own it forever. They .ro administrators (Romania) essentially have inititated private property in the dns system.
mod parent up!
Funny and tragically relevant to the story.
How can you possibly include Hawaii in your list of occupied countries? Hawaii became a U.S. state in 1959. The citizens of Hawaii are fully represented in the U.S. government. With 4 electoral votes, they have more representation than Alaska, Deleware, D.C., Montana, North & South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming. Hawaii is not an occupied country.
At the ICANN Building in New York City, a meeting of nations is in progress.
Russian official: The Soviet Union will be pleased to offer amnesty to your wayward website.
American official: The Soviet Union? I thought you guys broke up.
Russian official: Yes, that's what we wanted you to think! [evil laugh] -- "Simpson Tide", Episode 3G04
Just stop registering new domains and let the old ones stay.
.su domains happy and online.
It is probably a lot less work for everyone involved, and will keep people with
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Speaking of .tv - what happens to that TLD should Tuvalu actually sinks into the ocean?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Actually, no. Commonwealth.int is an international site (thus the .int) and not a TLD. I'm not against international organizations having sites and if cis.int wants to have a go at it that's fine with me. It's not the same as .su though.
And you get free popups too. Aren't they just SO nice to us?
Then, I can have fun names like riaa.will.su, netkooks.will.su, and the ultimate, scientology.will.su.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
Funny you didn't mention .cx. But I guess they aren't as popular as when they were free to people other than Christmas Island residents.
.ws, not "web site", or "world site", Western Somoa. Oh and the newest of the bunch, .bz, has become popular because of .biz, which I'm sure makes Belize happy.
.io is much like .tk, but you have to pay for it.
Also
You can find all this at http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm.
Oh, and
.oz was removed years ago. What used to live there moved to oz.au.
So if Bush gets his way and we obliterate Iraq, what will become of the .iq domain?
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
You are confused. .cx was never free to people other than residents. The opposite is true, it was (and afair still is) free to residents. Foreigners had to pay since the beginning.
a.boy.named.su
".sig,
.brt for Brittania? .beac (British Empire and Commonwealth)?
Hell, I don't want to get the Belgians mad at me. They're scary!
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
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.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
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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
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.
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