Greetings! The issue raised around keeping .SU is very sensitive. As a FORMER citizen of the SU I can collect much more petitions against keeping .SU compared to the number of those who want to keep it. ... Internet prohibits pornography, nazi web sites, etc. More than a quarter of the population of Moldova was killed or deported during the SU. If looking at things from this perspective this is similar to what the Nazi did in their times. So, it is very simple - SU does not exist any more, and it can not stay as a ccTLD any longer. Vittorio's proposal to have a gTLD .XSU is good - it can be one option, but I am more than sure that those Russians opting for SU would rather prefer to register in .RU. Best regards everyone, Veronica ----- Original Message ----- From: "Vittorio Bertola" <vb@bertola.eu> To: "Bret Fausett" <bfausett@internet.law.pro> Cc: "At-Large Worldwide" <alac@atlarge-lists.icann.org> Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 6:15 PM Subject: Re: [At-Large] User news - Comments related to .su ccTLD
Bret Fausett ha scritto:
Interesting thread on that here:
I'm not convinced that ICANN *must* retire .SU, primarily because I don't think the ISO will ever repurpose the SU characters for some other country's use. At least for a few generations, SU will always be associated with the Soviet Union.
The issue came up for chit-chat with the Board months ago (I think it's in one of my past reports).
I understand the difficulty in keeping it as a ccTLD if it goes away from the ISO list, and even if it doesn't, because there would be issues about who is the appropriate party in case of redelegations etc.; also, ICANN is afraid of establishing a precedent that allows no-more-existing ccTLDs to stay, especially when a transition was supposed to happen (though I'm unsure whether anyone can produce a piece of paper where someone ever agreed to transition it out, even in '91...).
However, most techies' position seems to be "we don't care about registrants, they should have known it'd have gone away", which I find unfair, because no one, including ICANN, ever warned people that this domain would have gone away. So simply turning it off, which is what several people in the ICANN community seem to advocate, sounds unacceptable to me.
My two-cent proposal would have been to keep all registrations but transition it to a gTLD, perhaps changing suffix through a predictable scheme - for example, .SU could become .XSU, and other ccTLDs for which a transition is unadvisable could follow a similar scheme in the future (before you ask, no, there's no .XX ccTLD). This would allow to manage the domain as a gTLD policy-wise, but would also provide a clear transition path that does not confuse users too much: yes it's a transition, but it's just one extra char, and it's the same for all the domains under .SU, so the average user will figure it out quite easily, much like, say, an area code renumbering in the telephone numbering system.
But I'm afraid that this might also become a political issue, with several former-Soviet-now-American-friendly countries pushing for .SU to disappear forever, together with lots of bad memories (and with the Soviet nostalgic advocates in their own neighbourhoods); and Russia pushing for it to stay, as it's often used by Russian minorities in ex-Soviet countries. And the (alleged) Estonian cyberwar didn't make this easier.
Regards, -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------
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