[governance] Back in the USSR: Soviet Internet domain name

[Adam Peake]

very disappointing, couple of weeks ago some 
trademark protection outfit grabbed aboynamed 
(a-boy-named.su is available as is peggy... )

Adam




>http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080419/soviet_union_online.html?.v=1
>
>Back in the USSR: Soviet Internet domain name resists death
>Saturday April 19, 2:20 am ET
>By Mansur Mirovalev, Associated Press Writer 
>Rescued from digital doom, Soviet Union's Internet domain name evokes
>nostalgia, controversy
>
>
>MOSCOW (AP) -- The Soviet Union may be in the dustbin of history, but
>there's one place the socialist utopia lives on: cyberspace.
>Sixteen years after the superpower's collapse, Web sites ending in the
>Soviet ".su" domain name have been rising -- registrations increased 45
>percent this year alone. Bloggers, entrepreneurs and die-hard communists are
>all part of a small but growing online community resisting repeated efforts
>to extinguish the online Soviet outpost.
>
>Russian nostalgia for the Soviet empire is part of the story. Nashi, or
>"Ours," is a pro-Kremlin youth group that gained notoriety for raucous
>protests against Kremlin critics. The group loyally praises President
>Vladimir Putin at "nashi.su," though it denies its choice of the ".su"
>domain was meant to send a political message.
>
>Many Web entrepreneurs also see potential profits in the domain, grabbing
>instantly recognizable names already claimed in other, better known domains.
>
>A small Moscow car repair shop that specializes in Ford vehicles boasts a
>home page at "ford.su," while the owner of "apple.su" is a Muscovite who
>said he is ready to swap it for a new laptop computer -- and not necessarily
>a Mac from Apple Inc.
>
>Vladimir Khramov, a network administrator from Moscow, said he bought
>"microsoft.su" last year simply to acquire an easy-to-remember ending for
>his e-mail address.
>
>While Khramov insists he "did not buy it for reselling," others are out to
>make a quick ruble. Yan Balayan registered a number of high-profile
>addresses, including "ussr.su," "stalin.su" and "kgb.su" -- he's asking for
>$30,000 each, but stands ready to haggle.
>
>With few exceptions -- namely, the tech-savvy Baltic state of Estonia --
>Internet penetration is relatively low in the former Soviet republics.
>Russia's Public Opinion Foundation says that only 27 percent of Russian
>adults use the Internet -- and only about 12 percent of the adults on any
>given day.
>
>Yet many Internet entrepreneurs are passionate about the ".su" domain, even
>as others are scornful of it as a relic of the past, saying it doesn't
>deserve the same status as ".ru" for Russia, ".uk" for the United Kingdom or
>".fr" for France.
>
>"They are selling tickets to a drowning ship," said Anton Nosik, a veteran
>Web journalist and founder of several successful online projects. "Their
>message is to losers and latecomers."
>
>What's next? Domain names for the Roman Empire or Ancient Greece?
>
>Country-code domains, derived from a list kept by the International
>Organization for Standardization, typically disappear when a country ceases
>to exist or changes its name. Both Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia lost their
>domain names after they broke up into smaller nations. So did Zaire after it
>became the Democratic Republic of Congo.
>
>The Internet's key oversight agency, the Marina del Rey, Calif.-based
>Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and its predecessors
>have made several efforts since the 1990s to eliminate the ".su" address.
>
>All have failed.
>
>In late 2006, ICANN even sought advice from the community on how best to
>revoke outdated suffixes. Yet the resistance continued, and the phase-out
>seems to be in a stalemate. The domain continues to work normally, but
>listed in records as "being phased out."
>
>"There are no technical issues," said John Crain, ICANN's chief technical
>officer. "It all comes down to politics."
>
>The ".su" domain dates back to September 1990, a little more than a year
>before the Soviet collapse. Russia was given the ".ru" domain name in 1994.
>Other former Soviet republics were also assigned codes.
>
>But the owners of ".su" sites stubbornly resisted switching on commercial,
>political and patriotic grounds. Some even accused the White House of
>scheming to eliminate the last remnants of its Cold War rival.
>
>As a compromise, the Russian organization responsible for registering new
>domain names under ".su" agreed to stop issuing new ones, while existing
>".su" addresses were allowed to continue for the time being.
>
>A loophole allowed existing ".su" addresses like "lenin.su" to assign
>subdomains such as "vladimir.lenin.su." As a result, the online population
>at ".su" kept growing throughout the 1990s -- although not nearly as fast as
>".ru."
>
>Then, in 2001, in response to pressure from users eager for freer access,
>registration in ".su" was opened to everyone everywhere.
>
>The price was kept artificially high -- $120 per name, six times the price
>for ".ru" -- to limit the number of new users and prevent entrepreneurs from
>grabbing names for resale in a practice called cybersquatting, said Andrey
>Vorobyev, spokesman for RU-Center, the body authorized to register domain
>names.
>
>But in January, RU-Center dropped the price for ".su" to $25 in a bid to
>boost the domain's worldwide popularity.
>
>The attractive new price sparked a registration rush that bumped up the
>number of ".su" sites to 45,000 today, more than quadruple the 11,000
>registered as of late 2006. The demand shows no signs of relenting -- the
>jump from 31,000 in January represents a 45 percent rise.
>
>But by domain name standards, the number of ".su" registrations is still
>very small. Russia's ".ru," for instance, has more than 1 million names.
>Germany's ".de" has 12 million, and the global ".com" has about 75 million.
>
>Champions of the online Soviet domain say there is still plenty of room for
>growth.
>
>Some envisage the ".su" domain as a virtual venue for those who fondly
>recall the old Soviet Union as a place where Russian, the lingua franca of
>the Soviet empire, knit together a host of Asian and European ethnic groups
>and cultures.
>
>And by late April, the ".su" domain plans to start allowing names in
>Russian; currently such names are limited to English letters, numerals and
>the hyphen.
>
>Associated Press Writer David Nowak in Moscow contributed to this story
>
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