The Domain That Refused To Die

Last Monday, Yahoo pulled the plug on their once-popular GeoCities network.  If you surfed the web in the late 1990s, then you probably visited your share of GeoCities sites, a big part of the reason Yahoo paid $3 billion for GeoCities back in 1999 (GeoCities were once the third most-popular Web destination).  The idea of GeoCities was that individual sites were grouped by theme into virtual “cities” – for example, Wall Street was the “city” for business-themed pages – it was a forerunner to the social networking sites that would eventually replace it.

The final curtain for GeoCities made me think of another recent Internet passing, the demise of Yugoslavia.  On September 30, ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit organization that regulates the usage of domains on the Internet, formally deleted “.yu”, the country code for Yugoslavia.  Yugoslavia, the country, met its end in 2006 when its last two republics – Serbia and Montenegro – went their separate ways.  With no longer a nation to represent, ICANN made the decision to delete “.yu” from the Internet’s architecture, wiping out perhaps as many as 4,000 websites that hadn’t yet transitioned to Serbia’s “.rs” domain.

This isn’t the first time ICANN has taken such action.  Many of the two-letter country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) were assigned back in 1990, during the infancy of the World Wide Web and the tail end of the Cold War.  That means that there were country codes assigned to Warsaw Pact nations that would soon cease to exist, like East Germany (“.dd”).  Czechoslovakia’s “.cs” was also retired after 1993 when the country split during the peaceful “Velvet Divorce” into the Czech Republic (.cz) and Slovakia (.sk).  In these cases the transitions to the new web domains went pretty smoothly, but there’s still one Cold War-era domain that has resisted all attempts to kill it off.

“.su”

Nineteen years after it went operational, and eighteen years after the country it represented, the Soviet Union, dissolved, “.su” is still going strong.  ICANN has wanted to phase out the use of “.su” for years now, but in 2001 RU-Center, the Russian organization that manages the domain in Russia started registering new “.su” sites, in 2008 RU-Center slashed the fee to register a “.su” site to just about $25, a sixth of the former price.  This lead to a boom in new “.su” registrations, a recent check on Google showed more than 80,000 sites registered to the domain, while a search of the “.su” domain resulted in over eight million hits.

So who registers a site in the “.su” domain?  It’s an interesting mix of Russian entrepreneurs, bloggers and Soviet nostalgists.  For some the domain provided a way to register a website with a famous brand name (i.e. “apple.su”), for others it was a cheap way to get on the ‘Net, and still others signed up for the Soviet kitsch value.  Though there are some who take the Soviet roots of “.su” quite seriously, there have even been rallies in the past to “save .su” and ICANN admits that the reasons for not deleting the domain are political rather than technical.  The most famous residents of “.su” are likely Nashi, the nationalistic, Kremlin-backed youth organization whose official website can be found at “Nashi.su”.  Nashi has co-opted other Soviet-era imagery into their organization; their youth leaders are called “commissars”, while they once staged a press conference to proclaim that Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space and a Soviet icon, was “Nashi!”  Even the name Nashi has nationalistic and Soviet overtones, it was a common way to refer to Soviet troops during World War II (Nashi is the Russian word for “ours”).

It’s hard to know what the future will be for “.su”, there was talk of it becoming a sort of online museum for all things Soviet or even a domain reserved exclusively for Russian-language websites (92% of “.su” sites are registered in Russia), though ICANN’s decision last week to allow the registration of domains in non-Latin alphabets could undermine that latter idea (Russia has been a big proponent of  a Cyrillic-script country domain for the Russian Federation).  It does seem though that “.su” will continue to have a future long after the demise of the country it once represented.

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