The US organization that oversees the web’s structure, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), wants to kill of the .su domain that was assigned to Russia just 15 months before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

The new domain assigned to Russia is, of course, .ru which is the most popular domain but many Russian organizations continue to register and use the older .su domain, partly because of its nostalgia.

Yahoo News is saying lobbyists in Russia claim that there are some 10,000 websites that use the .su domain and 1,500 were added this year. 

ICANN says that since the Soviet Union no longer exists, the .su domain should be removed and no longer used.  This has occurred with several other countries such as Czechoslovakia, which split into the Czech republic and Slovakia.

The Lobbyists make the point that other countries have two domains to choose from, Britain was assigned both .uk and .gb and well all know which one won that fight.

This is not a very heated issue as both the Russian Lobbyists and ICANN appear to be working together, for now to come to a mutual agreement.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 11:17 am under Internet.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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