Soviet Union TLD Owners Snub ICANN

An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist has up a post about ICANN's latest decisions about country-code TLDs. The body is making an effort to tackle the problem of Yugoslavia's .yu outliving the country by over a decade but is far from getting its way with the Soviet Union's domain .su. Around 2,500 new .su sites are created every year despite ICANN ordering its retirement — the disgruntled .su registrars have announced an 80 per cent price cut in the price of .su domains in response. 'It makes the much-publicized wrangles over the ".xxx" domain seem tiny by comparison. And it convinces me of the need to reevaluate the existence of the US Dept of Commerce-backed non-profit organisation that is ICANN. The current squabbles are petty compared to the diplomatic arguments that TLDs could cause. An international body like the UN would be a more appropriate overseer, surely?'"

Comments

Re:A rose by any other name.

[rs79]

There are quite a few one and two letter domains that were grandfathered in before it quit being allowed. (hp.com and x.org for example)

I would very much like to know the story of how x.com goes to paypal.com ?"

Two letter domains were never an issue. They're all taken from aa to zz.

The single letter ones are a special case. It went like this:

Nobody ever registered one. At some point a few leaked out. q, s and x I think. At this time there were about 800,000 .com names and people had the same irrational fear of the "million name com zone" that some people had of Y2K.

So, Postel put a hold on single letter domains. They appear as "reserved by the IANA" (never mind IANA didn't actually exist then, that is it had no legal personality, it was just an acronym Postel liked to use).

The theory was, if the root or tld servers melted down under the load of a million com named then there were these 26 one letter domains that could rescue is. I'm sure yahoo woudn't mind changing everything to yahoo.y.com.

There are about 40 million or so names in the com zone now. Yet still the single letter domains are reserved by ICANN ("because they always have been and Jons dead and we don't really know what we're doing") and any tld string must be three or more letters.

x.com was a papypal competitor. It was actually the good one and I was pretty pissed when paypal bought or consumed x.com. x.com gave me a card and a check book. Paypal just gave me grief.

x.com bought the domain off the guy who registered it originally. q.net is probably still for sale.