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

Sure!

[Otter]

An international body like the UN would be a more appropriate overseer, surely?

Absolutely! They'll be glad to crack the whip on registrars of non-countries like the Soviet Union and Taiwan.

Re:Sure!

[Otter]

The problem of sharing a forum with all the nations like the UN, is that until world peace is achieved, necessarily you will find nations there that are not friendly to each other.

The reason I mentioned Taiwan and not Israel (besides the fact that bringing up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict never does anything but stir up a mindless flamefest) is that the country that makes pretty much everything inside your computer and much of what connects it to my computer does *not* share a "forum with all the nations". It's excluded from the ITU and would be similarly excluded from any UN-run Internet bodies and structures.

Re:Sure!

[Hatta]

You mean, as soon as someone is criticizing Israel, suddenly it's antisemitism ?

Sure why not? I mean if you criticize the US, you get called anti-American.

Re:Sure!

[ScrewMaster]

and the USA is the only nation who has ever used them in anger

Not in anger. In a declared war. There's a difference. We didn't hate the Japanese, didn't question their right to exist, would much rather not have dropped Fatman and Littleboy. We just wanted them to stop, and the fire raids (which caused more total destruction than both atom bombs combined) weren't enough.

Most people seem to forget that, and believe that we skipped conventional warfare and went straight to nukes because, well, we just couldn't wait to murder thousands of innocent Japanese. As it happens, an absolutely incredible amount of firebombing was done before we even considered nuclear weapons, and if you read about how much devastation that caused you wouldn't be slamming the U.S. because it used a couple of 20 kiloton nuclear devicess (had a modern weapon been used Japan would have ceased to exist.) I'd also like to point out that we haven't used another atomic weapon against any enemy, declared or otherwise, to this very day. Neither did the Soviets, although one has to wonder if they'd have behaved themselves without M.A.D. and the various associated treaties. Hard to know what would have happened, but either way I'd say we swept our front door pretty well, and the rest of the world's too, once the nuclear cat was out of the bag.

Regardless, look past any distaste you may have for the United States or the Bush Misadministration and ask yourself these questions: a. has U.S. management of the Internet (really, of DNS) been sufficiently inept that control should be removed on performance grounds alone, and b. do you really, in your heart of hearts, want the United Nations to run the show? I mean ... really? More to the point, do you have the slightest idea how meaningless, from a technological perspective, it is to say "control the Internet"?

I mean, DARPA started the ball rolling, and then we let it develop in a way that has worked out to the benefit of, well ... everybody, I guess. Much of Internet engineering is actually pretty international already, when you get right down to it. Everyone is so afraid of the United States doing terrible things to people through the Internet (as if we could) and is behaving in such a petty manner, e.g. "We need to 'wrest control' of the Internet away from the U.S." What the hell does that mean, anyway? We own our parts of it. Everyone else owns theirs. Cripes.

Wise up. It's in our best interests that the Internet continue to work well, and right now it is. We need it. So does everyone else. Besides, the only aspect of the network that the U.S. could be consider to "control" is the Domain Name System, and that's just a bunch of distributed servers that any nation could duplicate and run in parallel. Nobody has, because then they would lose the benefits of being part of the global community. This is all politics and posturing, there's no substance here. Sure, some day you may get your wish: the root servers may get confiscated and someone else will be in "control" of the Internet.

Just be careful what you wish for, though ... you just might get it.

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.

What about .tv?

[trolltalk.com]

And what are they going to do when Tuvalu goes under water? Will they discontinue .tv? All its going to take is a foot or so rise in sea level and tuvalu goes glug glug glug ...

Re:What about .tv?

[TeknoHog]

And what are they going to do when Tuvalu goes under water? Will they discontinue .tv? All its going to take is a foot or so rise in sea level and tuvalu goes glug glug glug ...

Apparently, .su is not discontinued even if the country has gone gulag gulag gulag ...

Re:The UN? Surely you jest...

[damburger]

Yes, let's remove an organization whose competence is questioned and replace it with one whose corruption and incompetence is beyond question.

Refusing to rubber-stamp US wars of aggression doesn't make them corrupt or incompetent. Sure, they are impotent to stop these imperialistic rampages - but that is the the fault of their members, not the organisation itself

Why ever retire TLDs?

[iamacat]

Doing so can disrupt hundreds of thousands of businesses and personal domains. Let both .su and .yu remain. Most new sites will probably register under names of present day countries to highlight their local ties anyway.

Re:Cue the ISR queue

[Archangel Michael]

"In Soviet Russia TLD discontinues .yu"

Fixed!

unreasonable editorial remark

[drmerope]

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?

The little bit of editorializing in this submission is a little bit too much. I fail to see how making countries directly responsible will depoliticize the process. ICANN, is a flawed organization, but it is an effort to make management of the domain name system independent of governments and technically driven.

The IEEE is not a UN body; Its voting membership, and its activities are a combination of academics and engineers employed by major technology companies. Given this, I find it hard to see how the "surely" remark in the story summary can even be regarded as reasonable.

I for one would prefer a more technical, more independent ICANN--not a less technical, more political ICANN such as is embodied by the sluggish and highly politicized ITU.

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?

Looking for "Soviet Russia" jokes?

[PoopDaddy]

Find them all at the brand new http://www.slashdot.su/ !!!

Finally, the best of /.'s "In Soviet Russia..." comments all in one place.

Re:UN? Don't make me laugh!

[bjourne]

Here is a list of good things that the UN has done. Just because the UN hasn't won any wars doesn't mean that they have not accomplished a lot of good.

The Palestinian Occupied Territories /have/ a TLD

[Vainglorious Coward]

Don't forget ending .il and replacing it with whatever the 'Palestinians want to call the place.

Pardon me for interrupting your rant, but Palestine was allocated the .ps country code in October 1999.

Re:The UN? Surely you jest...

[HuguesT]

Hello Mr Righteous, I'll assume your from the USA :

1- Yes the UN costs money, what a surprise. Nearly all the nations pay for it, though. The US likes not to.

2- Have you never heard of US soldiers raping local women ?

3- China, Cuba, etc on UN councils. Learn how they work, representative from every country get to be in them in turns. That doesn't mean they run them. At the UN, you are bound to find people from nations you disagree with in various commissions. The #1 rule of diplomacy is that you keep talking to these people anyway.

4- The UN suck, have never done anything good, etc. The UN weapons inspectors in Iraq got rid of all the WMDs. You are aware the US troops have found none left, are you? Speak of the devil, this particular engagement really showcases the skill and competence the USA shows in dealing with world matters when unhindered by useless international bodies, doesn't it ?

Given a choice of labeling you hypocrite or ignorant, I'm afraid I'll have to go with the former.

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.

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.