Outdated Domains To Meet Their End

Dr. Eggman writes "The little used .um internet domain is no more. The domain was used, or rather unused, for US minor outlying islands and the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute had grown tired of maintaining it. This announcement comes as last month ICANN began taking comments on deletion of outdated suffixes. Among the top of the list? .su, the internet domain of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union's .su may prove harder to remove however, as Google still lists 3 million .su sites."

Comments

get rid of all TLDs

[pr0nbot]

Suffixes (and host prefixes) were a mistake. We ought to get rid of them altogether.

Re:get rid of all TLDs

[eln]

ICANN uses new TLD registration to basically print money, they'll never give up the TLD concept.

Re:get rid of all TLDs

[MysteriousPreacher]

With a few exceptions, they have pretty much lost their meaning. Few countries seem to have restrictions on the use of their suffix (Faroe Islands being one).

Suffixes still serve a valuable purpose. They allow us to identify hosts using DNS, pretty handy if you ask me. There may be a better way of doing it but I haven't seen one. mail.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com could be different servers and so prefixes are handy and reliable.

The only suffixes that are no-brainers would be www and ftp if they're all handled by the same host. We'll know by the port numbers anyway.

Re:get rid of all TLDs

[cyclomedia]

The mistake probably wasnt the suffix itself but the assumption that the country was the lowest common denominator between organisations. This is why we have microsoft.com and microsoft.co.uk instead of us.microsoft and uk.microsoft . Many companies do rearrange their websites to use this subdomaining system (as probably does MS) and it makes more sense in that respect.

We've also had this discussion before about .tel because it seems obvious that telephony should either use an email-like syntax but with a different identifyer: technical.support#uk.microsoft or at least use a "standard" suffix like www/ftp: tel.technical-support.uk.microsoft

however this doesnt solve the problem about what the root domains should be? .earth.sol may seem like a good idea so we can have microsoft.earth.sol and asteroidminingco.sol but still retain cyclomedia.co.uk(.earth.sol) seperate from cyclomedia.nl(.earth.sol), but cyclomedia.net is just a mirror of the latter and so could be considered naughty.

in any case the big co's are always going to buy up all the permutations they can, and that makes ICANN lot's of cash.

Re:get rid of all TLDs

[WoLpH]

I disagree, they do have a purpose and a use, however it's not used for the right purpose often enough. If I visit a site with the TLD from my country (.nl) I expect to see a dutch site, if I visit a website with a .fr TLD I expect a french site. TLDs like that have a purpose, however, they lose there purpose as soon as people start putting english site's on .nl domains and dutch sites on .com domains. That however, is a totally different issue.

Re:Let's Not Troll Too Much Please

[parasonic]

The destruction of a domain that is of no use, is nothing to be upset about.

But how much effort does it take to maintain a database of three million Soviet Union TLD's? The time alone to register these domains alone would be twenty-eight and one-half man years at five minutes to register. Just to register them. How much time would it take to switch domain names? How much to try to update links? How much to one's clients trying to get to a site that can no longer exist? Tens of thousands of man years?

Re:Why not just sell it?

[screaser]

Because let's be honest...

URLs like in.fini.ty, del.icio.us, etc are both extremely lame and annoying.

Don't be that guy.

Re:Let's Not Troll Too Much Please

[Dr. Eggman]

Then we should try to get as many people in agreement as possible. Maintain the domain until there are sufficiently few (.su's 3 million is too much for me, perhaps a quarter million or less?) and after that point sweep the remaining in to a generic tld like .mis or something else for a miscellaneous domain. I'm not sure how feasable something like that would be, but the least we can do is offer "endangered tld" holders some method to ease into newer or better maintained tlds. We could look at how servers are consolidated in older MMOs to see how they deal with when to consolidate and how the govern the process perhaps. With fewer holders, we could take up surveys of the sites, like some sort of digital geologist and see who are squatters, dead archive sites, ect. and determine if they can just be dropped or shuffled off to some internet archeology project. There's loads of things we could do, but it'll take international cooperation and agreement to bring old domains to a satisfactory conclusion.

But the Soviet Union? I thought you guys had disbanded?

Ambassador:*chuckles* Yes, that's what we wanted you to think!

Re:Why not just sell it?

[Scarblac]

For those who are wondering, there are only 8 words that end in 'su'

... in English. I think it's more common in French and Italian, and probably in loads of other languages I don't know anything about. And other languages do matter somewhat for this sort of thing (see Wikipedia)

But what you forgot or didn't realize

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

AFAIK, the .SU TLD was known to be obsoleted for a very long time. Think about it, USSR was no more years before web happened. People who bought names in there have themselves to blame for the trouble along with the registrar.

You're showing your youth here. The internet was here years before the web existed and .su was a valid domain for email "back in the day". Note to grammatically challenged Slashdotters - note the correct use of "you're" and "your" in my first sentence. Read it and learn.

However, you are certainly right that with the advent of the web that people should have realized that the .su domain was meaningless as the USSR was dead for several years. I took a quick look at a few .su sites and they appear to be Russian sites that are for some reason too lazy to move over to the .ru domain.

Whatever happened to "Cool URIs don't change"?

[xurble]

http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

Shouldn't obsolete TLDs just be mothballed with further registrations prohibited?

It's not just a case of registering new domains for all those sites - think of the volume of inbound links that will break if a whole domain just vanishes overnight.