Slashdot Mirror
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?'"
"In Soviet Russia TLD discontinues .yu"
Fixed!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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?
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)
.com names and people had the same irrational fear of the "million name com zone" that some people had of Y2K.
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
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.
Need Mercedes parts ?
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.