A few comments. Robert Guerra:
A related ccTLD issue is that of .yu. I recently visited Belgrade and noticed many billboards with URL's announcing a specific product or company. YU is still being used, and vary widely despite what we may hear from ICANN meetings. So what do we do?
The recent agreement was that .YU was being phased out, while the new .SR (and .ME) were phased in. The indicative timeframe is 2-3 years. We cannot expect .YU to vanish instantly, also because the .RS (and .ME) were not established yet. It is a catch 22: you cannot migrate to something that does not exist yet, and you cannot condition the delegation of a new TLD to the disappearance of the "ancestor" without leaving registrants without their domains. Veronica Cretu:
... 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.
I would like to try to separate TLD from the contents. I can understand the reasons to forcefully close a web site with offensive content (although I believe that different people might have different opinions on that) from forcefully closing a TLD that has hosted sites that were acquiescent to bad things happening, but also web sites that were related, for instance, to research and development. To make an example, suppose we have now a dictatorship in Badcountryland, we cannot assume that when the dispotic dictator will no longer be in power we will also change the ISO code of Badcountryland. Bret Fausett:
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.
Unfortunately, this has happened before. The code "CS", assigned to former Czechoslowakia, was reassigned to Serbia and Montenegro. Luckily IANA managed to convince the .YU operators to avoid requesting delegation of the new code and migration of .YU into .CS, otherwise we would have had a gigantic mess. But may I stress the fact that, while the ccTLD was never requested, and therefore never delegated, the ISO-3166 Maintenance Agency had indeed reassigned the code. Vittorio Bertola:
I'm unsure whether anyone can produce a piece of paper where someone ever agreed to transition it out, even in '91...
That is indeed the problem. Back then, IANA had only verbal engagement from the new .RU operator about the migration out from .SU. As we all know, "verba volant, scripta manent", so the same mistake has not been repeated for .YU.
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.
I completely agree with Vittorio, with the only caveat that ICANN had a very good reason for not warning the registrants, which is that it did not exist yet. The task to warn the registrants was of the .SU operator, but as discussed above, this was never put down contractually.
(before you ask, no, there's no .XX ccTLD).
There will never be. XX is reserved by ISO-3166, like the whole X- series, for user-defined applications. Cheers, Roberto