Soviet Union TLD Owners Snub ICANN 306
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?'"
Re:oh please let this become the next overdone mem (Score:3, Informative)
.sue? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:UN? Don't make me laugh! (Score:3, Informative)
> is the leading cause of mass death today. Ask the survivers in Rwanda or Darfur if they believe the UN
> is a capable fo being a force for good.
And I even previewed once.... sigh. Of course that should be UN at the end of both lines but with the slashkos crowd it is probably best to make it clear.... especially in light of 25 Democrat Party Senators voting to endorse Move On's notion of the US military this afternoon.
Re:UN? Don't make me laugh! (Score:5, Informative)
The Palestinian Occupied Territories /have/ a TLD (Score:5, Informative)
Pardon me for interrupting your rant, but Palestine was allocated the .ps country code in October 1999.
Re:Sure! (Score:5, Informative)
The reason I mentioned Taiwan and not Israel (besides the fact that bringing up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict never does anything but stir up a mindless flamefest) is that the country that makes pretty much everything inside your computer and much of what connects it to my computer does *not* share a "forum with all the nations". It's excluded from the ITU and would be similarly excluded from any UN-run Internet bodies and structures.
'palestine' is not a country (Score:0, Informative)
http://www.aliraqi.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-15513.html [aliraqi.org]
Re:So .su me. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A rose by any other name. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Sure! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Looking for "Soviet Russia" jokes? (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, come off it. (Score:3, Informative)
However, 'independence' in Taiwan is complicated, and means many things to many people: some Taiwanese reject 'independence' because they consider the ROC to be, if not the actual legitimate government of all China generally, at least its cultural heir. And others simply avoid 'independence' altogether and prefer the status quo for purely pragmatic reasons: the day-to-day situation is, for most intents and purposes, an independent Taiwan, and there is the strong possibility that if Taiwan declared independence from the PRC officially, the result would be the annihilation of everyone living there.
The figure usually quoted by PRC propaganda, arrived at by simply polling 'do you support Taiwanese independence,' is a loaded question and necessarily begets a skewed response. The people responding 'no' to that question do not necessarily have any love for the mainland, and certainly not for the PRC.
As it has become more and more apparent that 'reunification' would mean domination by Beijing (and not a restoration of the ROC government on the Mainland, or even an EU-like confederation), support for it in virtually all forms has disappeared from mainstream Taiwanese politics. Even "One Country, Two Systems" which is (from the PRC's perspective) a very lax 'reunification' stance, enjoys support from less than 10% of Taiwanese.
Re: UN absolutely? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.nic.ru/en/ [www.nic.ru]
the fee is 3000 rubles (about $120) per year so it's a relatively expensive TLD to register in.
I hope commierat.su isn't taken!
It wasn't when I just checked but having posted your intention on