Soviet Websites Marked for Liquidation
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which just concluded its 27th international public meeting, in Sao Paolo, Brazil, has announced that it may eliminate several domains with few users, among them .su – Soviet Union. It will finalize its plans by the end of the year. In addition to .su, .gb – Great Britain, .tr – East Timor are likely to be eliminated. ICANN has already removed .cs – Czechoslovakia, .dd – East Germany and .zr – Zaire from the ether.
The .su domain is managed by the Russian Fund for Internet Development. It was established in September 1990 The .ru domain was established in 1994. There are about 8000 names registered on the .su domain, although only about 6500 of them are active. By comparison, there are more than 650,000 addresses on .ru, even though it is much cheaper ($20 as compared to $100) to receive a .su address. Andrey Vorobyev, head of the public relations department of the RU-Center, told Kommersant that about half the companies on the .su domain will be unable to obtain the analogical address on .ru because that address is already taken. That will be a hardship for those companies, according to Vorobyev. In addition, it will represent a loss of the advertising money spent not only on the sites themselves, but also on publicizing the sites.
At RU-Center, they suggested that owners of sites in the .su domain may take court action against ICANN. In particular, Robert Shlegel, press secretary for the pro-government youth movement Nashi (“Ours”), which has a website in the .su domain, said that “in the event of the liquidation of the domain, out lawyers will study the problem and defend the rights of the movement in court.” Marketing director of Karavan telecommunications company Andrey Tsumanov, however, called the move “a normal practice of ICANN” and characterized the .su domain as “an inheritance from a past that is no longer in demand.”
www.commersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 11, 2006
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