ICANN Wants to End USSR Domain, But It's Still In Demand

[engine]

Russian Internet enthusiasts are locked in a tussle with an international body over a relic of the Soviet past -- the .su domain name assigned to the country just before the Soviet Union collapsed.

The U.S.-based body that oversees the World Wide Web's structure, ICANN, says the name is out of date and wants to kill it off. But thousands of Internet users still use the suffix -- in part for its nostalgia value -- and are fighting to save it.

Though nearly 16 years have passed since the end of the Soviet Union, .su is increasingly popular with businesses, clubs and political groups and Russian lobbyists on Wednesday said they had started negotiations with ICANN to keep it.

ICANN Wants to End USSR Domain, But It's Still In Demand [reuters.com]

[King_Fisher]

Its about the only thing left from the old days. Let them keep it.

Does any one pause to think that su stands for the Soviet Union? Probably not.

ICANN certainly has more important things to tend to...KF

[EliteWeb]

Just stop new registrations with it let old sites keep it. Then sell sub domains :)

[Rosalind]

I didn't realise ICANN were also into closing down old tlds. It seems strange, when at the same time there are new ones coming out all the time. Does it cost them extra to maintain them or something?

.su doesn't seem to lend itself to word-endings in the way that .us does, so I suppose there isn't that kind of market for it. They should probably just let it die gently, by not allowing new registrations.

[GerBot]

and there in lies some of the value Rosalind

you own cheap-stuff.us I own cheap-stuff.su

I get your typo traffic :)

it'd be funny if there was a squatter rush on .su domains now and ICANN decide to keep them

[m1t0s1s]

How can they ever completely remove a tld that's in such heavy use? A site:su search returns 3,000,000 results.

wikipedia .cs article:

.cs was the most heavily used top-level domain ever to be deleted. Statistics from the RIPE Network Coordination Centre show that even in June 1994, after much of the conversion to .cz and .sk had been done, .cs still had over 2,300 hosts. By comparison, other deleted TLDs (.nato and .zr) may never have reached double figures.

[wheel]

.nato? Cool.

[IanTurner]

It also wants to end .yu and replace them with .me and .rs

[heise.de...]

Now there's a launch that will generate some interest.

[Hugene]

I say keep both .su and .yu

It's part of history.

Deleting history is a sin.