In the culmination of a decades-long debate, the international community has finally recognized the Soviet Union ?€” online, that is.
The ISO, or International Organization for Standardization, voted this summer to grant the .su domain the status of exclusively reserved. Previously, all web sites ending in .su were to be phased out by 2042, at the latest.
"The zone is stable, it lives, and it will always live," Vladimir Molchanov, deputy director of the nonprofit Foundation for Internet Development, told a briefing Friday.
The .su domain, like .ru for Russia and .fr for France, represented a physical country ?€” the Soviet Union ?€” when it was first created in 1991, months before the state's final disintegration.
While most countries that changed names since the start of the Internet age ?€” including Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia ?€” lost their Internet domain codes, the Soviet Union continued to exist in cyberspace, buoyed in recent years by a flood of support from committed online users.
"The .su is perceived as more international than .ru. It unites Russian-speaking people without privileging any one country," said Timur Antov, who moderated the briefing.
The Foundation for Internet Development spearheaded the campaign to preserve the .su domain, citing its historical and cultural importance for Russian speakers. The acceptance of the .su domain is a sign of historical maturity, said Galina Soldatova, the director of the Foundation for Internet Development.
"We are no longer afraid of our past, we no longer reject it. We can now integrate it into our lives and thus become kinder and stronger," she said.
For most .su site owners, however, the motivation seems to be more practical than historical. Fashion Travel, an online tourist promoter, registered china.su and turkey.su because similar names were no longer available with an .ru ending, said Sergei Ponomaryov, the organization's Internet optimizer.
"It was the most normal and the most pleasant-sounding name," he said.
The foundation's efforts may also prove irrelevant by next year, said Mikhail Chekanov, marketing director at Rambler Media. Although currently there are only a few generic domain names available to all users, .com and .org among them, this may soon change.
"In 2009, generic top-level domains will begin to be distributed, and almost any organization will be able to register them for a certain sum," Chekanov said. "Already now, it is possible to predict domain names such as .msk, .auto or any others. ?€¦ The value of attractive domain names in the traditional domain zones will begin to fall."
Although many of the web sites registered in the domain have little Internet traffic, and thus are not commercially viable, Veni Markovski, representative of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, in Russia and the CIS, emphasized that Internet domains do not need commercial motivations. "Domains exist because there are users who use them and who want them," he said.
As of Aug. 1, just over 70,000 domains were registered under .su, compared with over 1 million for .ru.
The ISO, or International Organization for Standardization, voted this summer to grant the .su domain the status of exclusively reserved. Previously, all web sites ending in .su were to be phased out by 2042, at the latest.
"The zone is stable, it lives, and it will always live," Vladimir Molchanov, deputy director of the nonprofit Foundation for Internet Development, told a briefing Friday.
The .su domain, like .ru for Russia and .fr for France, represented a physical country ?€” the Soviet Union ?€” when it was first created in 1991, months before the state's final disintegration.
While most countries that changed names since the start of the Internet age ?€” including Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia ?€” lost their Internet domain codes, the Soviet Union continued to exist in cyberspace, buoyed in recent years by a flood of support from committed online users.
"The .su is perceived as more international than .ru. It unites Russian-speaking people without privileging any one country," said Timur Antov, who moderated the briefing.
The Foundation for Internet Development spearheaded the campaign to preserve the .su domain, citing its historical and cultural importance for Russian speakers. The acceptance of the .su domain is a sign of historical maturity, said Galina Soldatova, the director of the Foundation for Internet Development.
"We are no longer afraid of our past, we no longer reject it. We can now integrate it into our lives and thus become kinder and stronger," she said.
For most .su site owners, however, the motivation seems to be more practical than historical. Fashion Travel, an online tourist promoter, registered china.su and turkey.su because similar names were no longer available with an .ru ending, said Sergei Ponomaryov, the organization's Internet optimizer.
"It was the most normal and the most pleasant-sounding name," he said.
The foundation's efforts may also prove irrelevant by next year, said Mikhail Chekanov, marketing director at Rambler Media. Although currently there are only a few generic domain names available to all users, .com and .org among them, this may soon change.
"In 2009, generic top-level domains will begin to be distributed, and almost any organization will be able to register them for a certain sum," Chekanov said. "Already now, it is possible to predict domain names such as .msk, .auto or any others. ?€¦ The value of attractive domain names in the traditional domain zones will begin to fall."
Although many of the web sites registered in the domain have little Internet traffic, and thus are not commercially viable, Veni Markovski, representative of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, in Russia and the CIS, emphasized that Internet domains do not need commercial motivations. "Domains exist because there are users who use them and who want them," he said.
As of Aug. 1, just over 70,000 domains were registered under .su, compared with over 1 million for .ru.