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

Puerto Rico (.pr) TLD

[prxp]

Puerto Rico has its own TLD (.PR) since 1989. The funny thing is that Puerto Rico was never a country, it used to be a Spanish Colony way back in history and it's been a US territory for the last half century. Why do they bother so much about other non-country's TLDs?

Re:Sure!

[Anonymous Coward]

Taiwan is recognized as a country by 25 different countries in the world, a number that has shrunk largely due to political pressure from its larger neighbor (often times flat out buying support from countries for hundreds of millions of dollars). It also is one of the top 15 trading nations in the world, has a population larger than 75% of the members of the UN and has the 3rd largest port in the world in Kaohsiung (it may have recently slipped to 4th I'm not sure).

Taiwan to do this day has complete sovereignty over its territories, which include the island of Taiwan and several other islands, including Jinmen, less than 1 mile from China's mainland at its closest point. It has on its own managed to create and establish a mature democracy with its own currency, stock market, universal health care system, the previously tallest building in the world, a strong education system, has a fairly powerful defensive standing army (with a lot of US hardware - by he way the US still sells hardware to Taiwan and still maintains military ties with them) etc. Not to mention it's also considered one of the economic tigers, is a developed nation, and oh yeah, used to have a seat not only on the UN, but held veto-power in the Security Council.

As an open and free democracy there is indeed considerable debate today regarding the issue of reunification with China or actually declaring independence (there are still some elements of the constitution which declare it the rightful government of China dating back to the civil war). Much of the concern with angering China relates to China having over 1000 short-range missiles, plus several hundred aircraft, sitting just across the Taiwan Straight pointed directly at Taiwan, and people are also very aware of their continuing diminished presence in the world due to political and economic pressure from China. They also often look at the rapid economic growth China is currently experiencing and feel left behind (in truth Taiwan already experienced almost identical growth and their economy is far ahead of China's), and point to the continued pseudo-independence Hong Kong still enjoys to suggest that Taiwan could still maintain its own independence but gain greater access to the world if they choose reunification with China. Many of the people who strongly support this are descendants of people who come over from China in 1949 after the civil war. In comparison, the aborigines living in Taiwan much more strongly identify themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese and strongly support independence (btw, Taiwan also has its own language, Taiwanese, although the official language is Mandarin Chinese). These two positions can be seen very clearly amongst the two major political parties in Taiwan (split between green and blue).

And to the point, if you took away the .tw domain, I guarantee you Taiwanese would universally be pissed off and support for independence would probably at least in the short-term increase pretty dramatically. Almost everyone in Taiwan has access to the internet, and the .tw domain is often a way of identifying a web site that uses Traditional Chinese characters, as opposed to the Simplified Chinese that China itself uses.

Re:The Soviet Union exists no more

[rxmd]

the Soviet Union is gone and you can't be officially a citizen of that state. Who modded that informative?!

You are only half right. There are several ways that this can happen. For example, I have several friends in Uzbekistan (former Soviet republic) who don't have the Uzbek citizenship. This was because they moved, for example, from the newly independent republic of Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan in the early 1990s when the old Soviet passports were still valid (as you probably know, they didn't invalidate the old passports in 1991). Uzbekistan didn't give them Uzbek citizenship because they weren't born there, but immigrated after the independence of the country in 1991, and Kazakhstan didn't give them theirs because they didn't apply for it while they were living there, and now aren't living there anymore.

The Uzbek state issues them an "residence permit for persons without citizenship". In Russian it's called "vid na zhitelstvo". This is a little gray book that looks like a passport but isn't one. Regardless of the name, it has an entry called "citizenship", where it officially says "Citizen of the Soviet Union", because that's the last regular passport these persons happened to be holding.