ICANN has a Special List of approved country- and region-code top-level domains called ISO 3166-1. ICANN gets very upset when people insist on using ccTLDs which aren’t on its special list.
All sorts of people have thumbed their noses at ICANN’s list over the years. The United Kingdom annoyed everyone a long time ago by preferring .uk to .gb, the official ISO ccTLD. .uk was intended to be a short-term domain to be replaced in the near future by .gb, but the ccTLD stuck, and now hardly anyone has ever heard of .gb.
The Soviet Union, when it dissolved, also caused a headache because it had previously been awarded its very own .su ccTLD. Subsequently, .ru, the new ccTLD for Russia, has gained popularity, and ICANN wants to phase out .su, but there are still 1500 or so .su domain names being registered every year. The domain seems to have acquired a sort of cult status among Russian domain registrants.
Most recently, .yu, the Yugoslavian ccTLD, has finally been dropped from the list, several years after the country disappeared from the map because of civil war and was replaced by the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, which later split into its constituent parts.
I’m not sure what the point of all this is. If no one’s using .yu, fair enough, scrap it, but the fact that people still want to use .su - and the fact that someone is still willing to continue managing the registry - suggests to me that ICANN should leave it alone. We have enough Internet real-estate skirmishes going on with the rapidly diminishing supplies of .com domains; why make life more difficult by eliminating other TLDs?
Resources:
The Register on ICANN vs. the Soviet Union.
Canoe Money on the plan to retire .yu.
Posted by: domainstreet
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