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?'"
UN.. maybe. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why ever retire TLDs? (Score:2, Interesting)
Puerto Rico (.pr) TLD (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty Funny Article (Score:3, Interesting)
There are some perfectly valid reasons to be suspicious of any one country administering the TLD list. Retiring zombie TLDs isn't one of them. Just set up a grace period. After 3 years don't process any more new domain applications. After 5 years no domain renewals. After 15 years no TLD.
Very few domains will have a lifetime longer than that, and if they do chances are they are run by clueful people who will have aliases set up long before the tits up date.
Re: UN absolutely? (Score:2, Interesting)
Top level domains should be about routing traffic competently. I do not care if the USSR or Yugoslavia or Aland or the Faroe Islands or Antarctica are countries or not. You have to balance traffic routing as engineering efficiency and some ability to legally control the activities of the users of that domain. If say Tonga (with its nice
I'd back engineers any day over the UN.
Re:Why ever retire TLDs? (Score:2, Interesting)
None of that makes any sense. A domain name system is nothing more than a way of turning a string humans can read into an address a machine can use. There's already lots of alternatives [wikipedia.org] that have sprung up because the TLD situation is an entirely manufactured problem; it's not like there's a critical shortage of letter sequences in the world. Show me the legitimate technical problem with letting some guy off the street register screw.yu or dollarsfordonuts.su, or whatever. It is a relic, a holdover from the dark ages. It is legacy architecture.
But, hey, if we admitted that, we'd admit that there's probably no need for ICANN, full stop.
Why does creating lame new TLDs have to be a protracted, painful process? Why can't they just be made up on the fly? As far as I can tell, the answer is "because if could do that, we wouldn't need ICANN", and there's nothing more important to a typical organization than justifying its own existence.
Re:Sure! (Score:2, Interesting)
This takes the whole geography absurdity out of everything, since
Re:Get Rid of TLDs (Score:3, Interesting)
Because we tried that, and it didn't work. When ARPANet was starting, the namespace was flat. Every host had a name, there wasn't any hierarchical organization. When the network was less than 0.01% the size it is today, it was already too hard to handle name conflicts in that flat namespace. The hierarchical namespace with dot seperators that we use in DNS today was introduced to solve the problem, segregating the namespace so you only had to worry about conflicts between names in a single domain and not with names in everyone else's domain. And once you have a hierarchy, you have to have a top level to it. If you remove the current top level, then what used to be the second level becomes the top level. And you have to resolve all the conflicts when two different organizations own the same second-level name.
What do you mean, non-countries?!? (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone who is still officially a citizen of the Soviet Union, I must vehemently disagree with your classification!
The UN (Score:3, Interesting)
How does more bureaucracy solve the problem, it seems like it just creates more problems. What we need is a Philosopher-king [wikipedia.org] of Top Level Domains. So far it has been ICANN, and they have not been doing a bad job.
If ICANN were actually doing a bad job, we could open up alternative root name servers without them. And with public and industry support supplant them. But the internationalization arguments against ICANN are just empty rhetoric. Nothing about the way DNS or the Internet is structures prevents us from running domain services in parallel to ICANN's, if the EU wanted they could invent their own bureaucratic organization to handle all TLDs, setup root servers and run with it. And users could choose to use the EU ones or ICANNs or both.
That hasn't happened, and I am arguing that there is no technical barrier. Therefor I assume the only barrier is that nobody is serious enough in their objections of ICANN to do so.
Re: UN absolutely? (Score:3, Interesting)
Secondly, when you read this kind of info, you need to read stuff a little more carefully, regardless of the source. The article has some convoluted argument about the relationship between the IWC and the UN, but nowhere does it state that the IWC is part of the UN. And in fact, it's not.
I agree with the rest of your post though. The fact is, many TLDs are messed up, including the one you and I are using at this very moment:
Particularly "misused" are the two-letter national TLDs, such as
Anybody know where I can register an
The Soviet Union Will Never Die! (Score:3, Interesting)
Our mighty republics will ever endure.
The great Soviet Union will live through the ages.
The dream of a people their fortress secure.
Long live our Soviet Motherland, built by the people's mighty hand.
Long live our People, united and free.
Strong in our friendship tried by fire. Long may our crimson flag inspire,
Shining in glory for all men to see.
Music [marxists.org]
Re:Sure! (Score:5, Interesting)
Taiwan to do this day has complete sovereignty over its territories, which include the island of Taiwan and several other islands, including Jinmen, less than 1 mile from China's mainland at its closest point. It has on its own managed to create and establish a mature democracy with its own currency, stock market, universal health care system, the previously tallest building in the world, a strong education system, has a fairly powerful defensive standing army (with a lot of US hardware - by he way the US still sells hardware to Taiwan and still maintains military ties with them) etc. Not to mention it's also considered one of the economic tigers, is a developed nation, and oh yeah, used to have a seat not only on the UN, but held veto-power in the Security Council.
As an open and free democracy there is indeed considerable debate today regarding the issue of reunification with China or actually declaring independence (there are still some elements of the constitution which declare it the rightful government of China dating back to the civil war). Much of the concern with angering China relates to China having over 1000 short-range missiles, plus several hundred aircraft, sitting just across the Taiwan Straight pointed directly at Taiwan, and people are also very aware of their continuing diminished presence in the world due to political and economic pressure from China. They also often look at the rapid economic growth China is currently experiencing and feel left behind (in truth Taiwan already experienced almost identical growth and their economy is far ahead of China's), and point to the continued pseudo-independence Hong Kong still enjoys to suggest that Taiwan could still maintain its own independence but gain greater access to the world if they choose reunification with China. Many of the people who strongly support this are descendants of people who come over from China in 1949 after the civil war. In comparison, the aborigines living in Taiwan much more strongly identify themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese and strongly support independence (btw, Taiwan also has its own language, Taiwanese, although the official language is Mandarin Chinese). These two positions can be seen very clearly amongst the two major political parties in Taiwan (split between green and blue).
And to the point, if you took away the .tw domain, I guarantee you Taiwanese would universally be pissed off and support for independence would probably at least in the short-term increase pretty dramatically. Almost everyone in Taiwan has access to the internet, and the .tw domain is often a way of identifying a web site that uses Traditional Chinese characters, as opposed to the Simplified Chinese that China itself uses.
Re:The Soviet Union exists no more (Score:5, Interesting)
The Uzbek state issues them an "residence permit for persons without citizenship". In Russian it's called "vid na zhitelstvo". This is a little gray book that looks like a passport but isn't one. Regardless of the name, it has an entry called "citizenship", where it officially says "Citizen of the Soviet Union", because that's the last regular passport these persons happened to be holding.
Apatrides (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact that the 'nationality' field says "Soviet Union"... Well, it should be treated as a system in an undefined state, the variable was not initialized, so whatever was stored in the memory a while ago is the current value of the variable
The problem is that such people, if in trouble, cannot go to "Soviet Union" and ask for shelter, or demand things from their government.
Re:The Soviet Union Will Never Die! (Score:2, Interesting)